Women's Rights In A Thousand Splendid Suns

In the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini develops the idea of woman’s rights through the characters to highlight how women were treated compared to men. Most events in the story are set in Kabul, Afghanistan between the early 1960’s to early 2000’s. Limited rights for women included marriage, education and pregnancy.

Women in Afghanistan have very limited say over their marriage and career. Nana is a good example of this situation where she is arranged to marry a boy from Shindad when she is fifteen. Just a week before she was due to get married, she had a seizure which is expressed to be a jinn (evil spirit), where her fiancé’s family immediately cancel the wedding. The fiancé’s family shows a typical example of Afghani men finding wives who are healthy for only fertility reasons. However, when put in the opposite situation of the gender, the wife must live with such burden. As Nana says, "A man's accusing finger always finds a woman." she is accused of forcing herself on Jalil when in a mutual relationship. Nana's life undergoes unfortunate incidents with Jalil, thus leading to her suicide.

It isn’t uncommon in Afghanistan, but it causes many problems such as miscarriages which is something Mariam experiences. Mariam becomes pregnant at sixteen with Rasheed. However, "there was blood and she was screaming. (Page 88)" Mariam's baby dies in her womb. As dreadful as the scene seems, many is the case of girls in Afghanistan. Because of so many teenage mothers, the risk of sexual diseases and infant mortality is increased in their society. Hence, Mariam's incident adds on to the importance of education to know and understand the right age to marry. As described in the novel, education for women in Afghanistan became something unusual for women. They were forced to leave when they