With All Our Strength The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan by Anne E. Brodsky (New York and London: Routledge, 2003. 318 pages.)

Abstract

Anne Brodsky’s With All Our Strength provides an ethnographic study of
the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). This
organization was founded in 1977 by the enigmatic Meena as “the first
independent feminist women’s organization in Afghanistan, whose sole
purpose and aim was the advancement and equality of Afghan women” (p.
43). RAWA’s main vehicle of empowerment is education, through literacy
and political consciousness, and its vehicles for promoting these tasks are literacy classes and Payam-e-Zan, a quarterly political magazine (published
in Dari and Pashtu) that includes political commentaries on a wide range of
issues relating to Afghanistan.
The author describes RAWA as a humanitarian and political women’s
organization that has operated in Afghanistan and Pakistan since its founding
in 1977. She provides a good review of its philosophy and workings
through an impressive number of interviews and personal observations
gained while living and traveling with RAWAmembers. Her analysis offers
insight into Afghanistan’s patriarchal culture, as well as the customs and
traditions that have impacted its women. She presents readers with an
excellent analysis of the events that led to the conflict in Afghanistan, discusses
the country’s situation since the regime change of 1979, and highlights
the humanitarian cost of war, focusing on the conflict’s impact on
Afghani women. In addition, she describes the horrors women faced under
the Taliban regime and outlines the continued challenges that they face in
post-Taliban Afghanistan as well as RAWA’s response ...