With U.S. attention focused on Afghanistan, Americans “were really horrified by the way … Afghan women were treated,” Mrs. Bush said, with women not allowed out of their homes alone and girls forbidden to go to school.
“A country with half the people marginalized like women were, is a failed country,” she said.
New leaders in Afghanistan are now doing what they can to get people educated and “millions of girls are in school now,” Mrs. Bush said, but Afghan women must still “struggle … to get out from under these primitive ideas.”
Closer to home, Mrs. Bush said women also have challenges.
“In a lot of ways, we still defer to men. I think that’s social … especially the way women in the South were raised. That’s just what you did. … All of us need to be conscious of it.”
Lack of equal pay is another example. “That’s certainly still happening, and we all need to just speak about it constantly.”