With All Our Strength

Anne Brodsky’s With All Our Strength provides an ethnographic study ofthe Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). Thisorganization was founded in 1977 by the enigmatic Meena as “the firstindependent feminist women’s organization in Afghanistan, whose solepurpose and aim was the advancement and equality of Afghan women” (p.43). RAWA’s main vehicle of empowerment is education, through literacyand political consciousness, and its vehicles for promoting these tasks are literacy classes and Payam-e-Zan, a quarterly political magazine (publishedin Dari and Pashtu) that includes political commentaries on a wide range ofissues relating to Afghanistan.The author describes RAWA as a humanitarian and political women’sorganization that has operated in Afghanistan and Pakistan since its foundingin 1977. She provides a good review of its philosophy and workingsthrough an impressive number of interviews and personal observationsgained while living and traveling with RAWAmembers. Her analysis offersinsight into Afghanistan’s patriarchal culture, as well as the customs andtraditions that have impacted its women. She presents readers with anexcellent analysis of the events that led to the conflict in Afghanistan, discussesthe country’s situation since the regime change of 1979, and highlightsthe humanitarian cost of war, focusing on the conflict’s impact onAfghani women. In addition, she describes the horrors women faced underthe Taliban regime and outlines the continued challenges that they face inpost-Taliban Afghanistan as well as RAWA’s response ...