The First Ones

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi At a time when women’s presence on stage and screen was taboo in Afghanistan — and men played female roles — Zainab Nandari was established by Zainab Enayat Seraj, head of the W...

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi Najiba Sharifi, Afghanistan’s first female surgeon, was a medical student at Kabul University in the 1960s — one of the three young women featured in the iconic 1962 photograph...

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi During King Amanullah Khan’s reign, alongside the establishment of girls’ schools and women’s publications, Afghanistan’s first women’s hospital — “Masturat Hospital” — was foun...

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi In the early spring of 1941, after a 13-year hiatus, Radio Kabul resumed broadcasting with morning and evening programs — one hour in the morning and two hours in the evening....

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi In the third year of King Amanullah Khan’s reign, as the winds of modernization and freedom swept through Afghanistan, the idea of a dedicated women’s publication emerged. The y...

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi When King Amanullah Khan, Afghanistan’s progressive monarch, returned from his travels through Europe, the Soviet Union, and Turkey, a fresh wind of reform began to blow through...

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi Nearly two decades after the establishment of radio in Afghanistan, the country’s citizens had yet to hear a song performed by a woman, and no one knew how the public would reac...

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi After the ratification of Afghanistan’s third constitution in 1964, women were granted the right to vote and to run for parliament for the first time. Following these legal ref...

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi Asma Rasmiya Tarzi was born in Damascus, one of the oldest cities in the Middle East and a major center of Islamic civilization, during the Ottoman Empire. Her father, Sheikh M...

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi Afghanistan’s first female general, Suhaila Siddiq, was a pioneering doctor who broke gender barriers, treated war wounds, and stood up to the Taliban. Born in 1934 in Kabul to...

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi The decade of democracy in Afghanistan (1964–1973) brought political and civil freedoms after centuries of autocracy. On October 1, 1964, King Mohammad Zahir Shah ratified a ne...

✍️ By: Hamia Naderi Until 1920, girls in Afghanistan had no access to formal education. During King Amanullah Khan’s reign, women’s education became a priority, and the first girls’ primary school,...