Afghanistan is regarded as a classical patriarchal society, where social tradition, religious doctrine and socio-economic and cultural backwardness have made women second-class citizens. But what has been the nature of life for women in Afghanistan? How have they been treated, both in the private sphere and in public? How did they resist mistreatment during the war inside Afghanistan, in refugee camps or in diaspora? Who are the sponsors and perpetrators of violence against Afghanistani women? And what are the connections between Islam, local customs, the mistreatment of women, and women’s connectedness to revolution and jihad? This book provides answers to these questions through a study of the life and short stories of the Afghan writer, Maryam Mahboob.
This special issue is dedicated to the theme of Women Writers and Intellectuals. Virtually no women are part of the literary/intellectual canon from Russia to Greece, and when women do appear as writers, they are generally cast as an exception, or as marginal or incidental. Their presence, in other words, only serves to reinforce, explicitly and implicitly, the masculine ideal that defines the Central, Eastern and Southeastern European intelligentsia. Yet women wrote, both in private and public. The articles written by contributors to this issue fall into two categories: those that consider the invisibility of women at the heart of the literary canon and those that reshape the images of the intelligentsia in the modern history of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. With forum: Contemporary women writers and intellectuals.