Educational Media Reviews Online

In September 1996, the Taliban took over Afghanistan and forced women into their homes. They were not allowed health care or schooling, and certainly no birth control. Sally Armstrong calls the rescinding of the Afghani women’s human rights a catastrophe that was “the worst, or one of the worst” things that had ever happened to women; and that the world looked the other way. In Armstrong’s documentary, Daughters of Afghanistan, she follows the lives of five women living through the political and cultural changes in Afghanistan from the Taliban rule and beyond. The style of much of the film, having a voice-over of the interviews with beautiful landscape and city scenes from Afghanistan, is expertly used.

Armstrong looked forward to the day that the Taliban were defeated, to the day that women could be freed from their houses. She went to Afghanistan when this happened, and then two and four months afterwards, for progress reports to see how several women that she had met and touched her life had fared in the new government. Her primary focus was on Dr. Sima Samar, a strong woman who had early in life accepted an arranged marriage so that she could go to university and become a doctor, who had fought the Soviets, the Mujahidin, and then the Taliban, to do whatever she could to help women.

In the film, Armstrong describes several projects created by Dr. Samar for women and children. Dr. Samar built clinics and shelters for women and children, and a school for women. We meet other women too. Hamida, who is the principal of Samar’s high school for women, teaches women how to do things so that they can get jobs, like computer skills and driving. We meet Soghra, a widow, pregnant with her seventh child, who walked for nine nights from the country to Kabul avoid the Taliban so she could find shelter in Dr. Samar’s refuge. Later we discover that her husband is alive, but that they were so poor that this was the only way for the family to survive. We also meet Camellah, who cannot say no to sex with her husband or use birth control because of cultural norms, even though she is pregnant with her ninth child and does not think she can live through another birth. And we meet Lima, who thinks she is thirteen, who has to be the mother for her four younger siblings, and whose favorite place to go to if she can get away is the graveyard where her parents are buried. Political changes after the fall of the Taliban initially promised some changes in the lives of women. Dr. Samar was named the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Women’s Affairs in the first Afghani Government. However, the Islamic fundamentalists reasserted themselves quickly, and made sure that she was seen as an enemy to the religious state, and she was soon out of the government, the recipient of a fatwa, and getting death threats.

Some things are changing for women in Afghanistan, but others are not. Women (in Kabul) are allowed out of their homes, unlike under Taliban rule, and some are allowed to seek medical attention and go to school. But many women still are expected to wear their Burqas, the long dress that covers their entire bodies, and in many families are still treated as brood mares. In the countryside, most things have not changed for women at all since the defeat of the Taliban. The larger picture demonstrates that political change cannot change cultural norms; it can provide a catalyst for change, but cultural change moves much more slowly than political change. This is especially true where religious fundamentalism is involved. This is something we are learning in Iraq today. This film is highly recommended for its relevance to women’s studies, sociology, and Middle Eastern studies.