Today is the day we must learn never to give up. Today is Women’s Day, a day that honors the woman whose absence darkens every home, the woman who shapes society’s values, the woman without whom the world feels incomplete. Yes, today is that day. Yet in our country, this day feels no different from any other. For women here, it may actually be a day of deeper despair, because in the society where we live, being a woman is not something to celebrate. It is treated as a crime. When I sit with these thoughts, one question keeps rising inside me: how much courage does it truly take just to be a woman in Afghanistan?
When a woman walks among men, she faces discrimination and violence at every turn. She must hide her face. She cannot step outside without a male guardian by her side. She must keep her voice low in cars and public spaces, because the men in her family treat her very existence as something to be ashamed of.
Today, the voices of Afghan women have been silenced, and the rights that were stolen from them remain far out of reach. Today is Women’s Day, a day that belongs to the woman who gives everything to her family and her community, yet moves through life with her voice suppressed and her innocent eyes seeing the world only through a narrow opening beneath a veil. Today belongs to the woman who works from behind a curtain just to put an honest meal on the table for her children.
Being a woman in Afghanistan is not easy. You give up so much just to stay alive. Life here means fighting constantly, fighting for the rights that others took from you, and fighting for a single meal. Being a woman in Afghanistan means living with pain and carrying a weight of despair that never seems to lighten. In other countries, women feel a sense of safety when they see police officers. In Afghanistan, the sight of police fills us with dread. We fear that they will take us away, without cause and without reason.
Today is Women’s Day, but for Afghan women, it feels no different from any other day. If anything, it feels worse because others took our rights and we said nothing, not because we chose silence, but because no one ever gave us the right to speak. Every Afghan woman carries a universe of pain inside her, pain that has gone unhealed for years. I do not know how much longer this suffering will stretch on. I believe these dark days will eventually end, but by then, our youth will be gone, and for some women, the hope and the hunger to live fully may have already burned out.
These dark days have hardened our hearts. Even when good days finally arrive, we may not be able to feel them, because something inside us has been slowly killed. Compassion has faded, softness has disappeared, and our hearts have become heavy with everything we were forced to absorb in silence. All of this grew out of watching our rights disappear before our eyes while we stood there with no voice and no power to fight back. And yet, when I look at the courage these women carry every single day, I feel an overwhelming urge to honor them. Their bravery deserves to be celebrated and spoken about as loudly and as widely as possible.
I am making a promise to myself today. I will write a book called Women of Afghanistan, and I will dedicate it to the shattered yet fearless mothers of this land. I will document the story of every Afghan woman, capturing her courage in detail, page after page. These women are our greatest role models. As the mothers of Afghanistan’s future, we must draw strength from the women who fight daily for a simple, honest meal, women who absorb the mockery and rejection of a hostile society, who live under the constant threat of being taken off the street, and who still show up, still work, and still resist.
Happy Women’s Day to the brave and unbreakable women of Afghanistan!
You can read the Persian version of this Afghan woman’s story here:
