Kabul's only female driving instructor,Shakila Naderi -teaching the Afghani women to drive

In a city where women's public presence had been systematically erased under Taliban rule and where the years since 2001 had brought uneven and fragile progress, Shakila Naderi ran a driving school in Kabul — and her students were women.

The significance of this fact is hard to overstate without some familiarity with what it represented. During the Taliban's control of Afghanistan through the 1990s, women had been prohibited from leaving their homes without a male escort, banned from working, forbidden from attending school. The restoration of some rights after 2001 was real but unstable, contested, and geographically uneven. Urban women in Kabul occupied a different reality than women in rural provinces, and even in Kabul, public space remained deeply gendered in ways that formal legal changes had not yet altered.

Against this backdrop, Shakila Naderi's driving school was a small but pointed act of normalization. Learning to drive is, in most of the world, an unremarkable practical skill. In Kabul, for women, it was a statement about the right to independent movement — to go somewhere without needing a male family member to take you there. It was about time, autonomy, and the basic logistics of a life lived on one's own terms.

Naderi, by accounts of her work, was practical rather than rhetorical about what she was doing. She taught women to drive. She dealt with the anxieties of students who had been told, implicitly or explicitly, that public space was not for them. She navigated the complications of a city where harassment was real and where not everyone was pleased by the presence of women behind wheels.

The existence of her school did not resolve Afghanistan's profound gender inequities. But it was a node in a network of women who were insisting, in concrete daily ways, on a different future.