"About the New Women": Seclusion and Schooling in 1920s Afghanistan

Abstract: The first school for girls in modern Afghanistan, the short-lived Maktab-i Masturat, operated in Kabul in the 1920s. Girls' schooling outside of the home in this period was a major source of contention between male elites, particularly due to its perceived violation of seclusion. This article draws on a range of sources that document life inside and around the schoolroom to examine how the key issue at stake—women's seclusion—operated. It argues elite education grew out of elite seclusion in terms of its rationalizations, the space it occupied, its dress code, and its teachers. In reworking these concepts, educators drew on a south–south axis of communication in which these same issues were actively being considered. Examining the transregional circulation of ideas by and about "new" Muslim women, including Muhammadi Begum's Urdu text that served as the home economics textbook, illustrates Kabul's affinities with a wider history of elite Muslim women's schooling.