Reframing the History of Women's Wage Labor: Challenges of a Global Perspective

When the United States embarked on a war against the Afghanistan Taliban in fall 2001, its apparent motive was to eliminate a regime that had harbored those it believed to be responsible for the devastating destruction of 11 September. To justify its actions, the American administration provided a long list of grievances against the Taliban, none of them more persuasive than its pernicious treatment of women. One of the reasons it was going to war, it argued, was to free Afghanistan's women who had been closely sequestered within households, denied even rudimentary education, and dismissed from jobs. Without the possibility of earning a living, women's health had declined, maternal deaths had soared, and women were reduced to absolute dependence and penury. Americans responded to this story with alacrity. Ignoring several centuries of their own past tradition, they expressed outraged sympathy over rules that restricted girls and women to the home. They waxed particularly indignant at regulations that prohibited education for girls and refused even highly trained women access to paid employment.