Two cases of serious female bravery out of Afghanistan: first, the case of the only female athlete who will be competing for the country in the Beijing OLympics, Mehboba Andyar. She’s not going to win a medal, but she deserves a thousand medals, and hopefully her example will help to inspire many of her countrywomen. She’s getting death threats, she has to run after dark, but she’s refusing to give. up.
Second, and this may be the only time that a television talent show will be praised here, there’s also real bravery in the women who chose to compete in the Afghan version of The X-Factor. They too didn’t win, but I’ll bet they inspired many young women to think they could have some sort of public place.
One of the semi-finalists was a Pashtun woman from Kandahar, Lima Sahar, who had learnt to sing in secret and who, in spite of appearing on television as an aspiring entertainer, still wore a burqa in her conservative home town. She faced hate mail from those who regarded her participation as blasphemy, although her bravery won her a broad fan base too. One girl in the audience said: ‘I’m voting for her courage, not her voice.’
Then the bad news, the last undergraduate women’s studies course in Britain is finishing this year. This less than charitable piece from the Independent suggests it is because the subject hasn’t moved with the times, but I suspect the growing interest in degrees being vocationally orientated has more to do with it. And it’s not of course the end of women’s studies – it is incorporated in the mainstream to a great extent. (Although I wonder if the sociology lecturer who 15 years ago told me “radical feminism has nothing to offer sociology” is still peddling the same line.)
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