Women in Pencil Skirts, Co-Ed Classrooms: Photos from “Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan”

Photo stories from midcentury Afghanistan crop up every now and again (see this Foreign Policy collection from 2010), but somehow this morning I fell down a deep hole on this Facebook album called “Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan.” This particular photo was taken at Kabul Medical University in the late ’70s, presumably before the upheaval of the civil war that began in 1978; the subsequent three-plus decades of nearly continuous unrest have resulted in a literacy rate of 20% for women aged 15–24. In rural areas, that percentage drops to under 10%.