Summary: In April of this year, a group of some 300 women protesters demanded that the government in Kabul repeal a repressive new law that went so far as to permit marital rape. They were publicly harassed and labeled 'whores'. Around the world, many observers were outraged. The law seemed to signal a return to the kinds of policies that the Taliban had instituted when it ruled Afghanistan - when the burqa stood as a haunting symbol of the regime's subjugation of women. While visitors to the country commonly report encountering a land somehow 'lost in time' where women are almost completely absent from the public world, this month historian Scott Levi examines the century-long efforts to improve women's lives in Afghanistan.
