Paper 2

Paper 2—Kabul Beauty School

The documentary film Kabul Beauty School details the struggle of a group of American and Afghani women to start a beauty school in post 9/11 Afghanistan. Although the film deals with the many challenges of women in Afghanistan to gain equality with men, one of the most striking elements of the film is the similarity of the challenge the Afghani students face to balance their work life and the need to care for their family and children. Like women in America, women in Afghanistan are expected to take care of most domestic tasks, even when they are the primary source of their family’s income.

In her essay “The Opt-Out Revolution,” Lisa Belkin describes the conflict American women in high-paying corporate jobs experience between the responsibilities they feel toward their job and their perceived responsibilities toward their family. For example, she says, “while a national correspondent in Houston I learned you can’t hop on a plane every morning to explore the wilds of Texas while leaving a nursing baby back home” (Belkin 6). Belkin struggles to satisfy her love of her job with her need to fulfill the definition of a “good mother” and her career suffers because of it—she leaves a high-paying job to become a freelance news writer working from home.

The life of the women in Kabul was a much more tragic and extreme example of this same scenario. One of the women in the school, Nazira, brings some of her American teachers to her home to see what her life is like when she is not at school. Like Belkin, although her job brings in much more money than her husband, she is still expected to care for her entire family, cooking, cleaning, and caring for her in-laws. She must work extremely long hours to accomplish all of this and her career as a beautician suffers because of it. Her husband, like Belkin’s, is not expected to play any role in the domestic duties of the household.

This is not to say that American women are anywhere close to being in the same situation as the women in Afghanistan. We are not. We experience on a daily basis more freedom than women like Nazira even believe is possible. And yet, it’s interesting that Deborah Rodriguez, the author of the book on which the film is based, presents herself as better informed about the “right way” women should live, when American women are still dealing with the same problems as their Afghani sisters. Rodriguez says in an interview, “I always feel pressured to fix everything because I am American” (“Author Interview”).

Although Rodriguez may have originally intended Kabul Beauty School to draw attention to the horrible circumstances of women in Afghanistan and their struggles to overcome them, she also serves, whether consciously or unconsciously, to echo a serious problem facing women in the United States—the very women who were supposed to show Afghanistan a better way of life. Kabul Beauty School shows us that women everywhere need to work together to redefine the expectations of gender if we are all ever to truly be liberated. The issues facing the women in Afghanistan are global are global ones and show us that we need to work more for global solutions.