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I am the founder and editor in chief of Zan Times, an Afghan women–led media that covers human rights in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. When the situation in Afghanistan was worsening in 2017, I moved to Canada to pursue a master's degree in communication and culture at York University in Toronto. I was hoping that by the time the degree was completed, I could return to Afghanistan and contribute to my society as an academic. One project close to my heart was writing about Afghan women's political history from the 1960s to the 1990s, three decades when women had legal rights to participate in public life. I wanted to understand how those legal rights shaped women's political identities and activism. This was a missing piece of my identity. Growing up in post-2001 Afghanistan, I had no historical foundation to look back on. I didn't know what the generation before me had done, what had motivated them, or how they led some of the largest protests across the country.
In school and university textbooks in Kabul, there was no mention of women's political contributions. As a result, I internalized the idea that Afghan women had always been passive victims, hidden under blue burqas. That belief was shattered in 2013 when I hosted an elderly woman who told me about the protests she organized at Kabul University in the 1960s and '70s. She said she would leave home at 5 a.m. and return at 1 a.m. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Was she exaggerating? How could she have had that kind of freedom in 1970s Kabul, freedom I never experienced in post-2001 Kabul?
That conversation ignited a fire in me. I needed to understand our past. How did we go from a Kabul where women wore miniskirts and no headscarves to one where a bare female face is illegal? How did we get here?
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