The novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is set in Afghanistan. It covers a period of approximately 50 years, from the 1950s to the mid-2000s. Hosseini uses allusions to real Afghan events to describe the ever-changing freedoms that Afghan women endure due to the lack of stability in the Afghan government. From the 1950s until around 1985, the Soviet Union had Afghanistan under its control. This Soviet involvement in Afghanistan caused the ideologies of communism to spread into Afghan culture. One of the communist ideas they assimilated into was the thought that every person is equal. This idea made life much easier for Afghan women. One of the freedoms granted to them under Soviet control was the permission for women to receive an education: “The government had sponsored literacy courses for all women. Nearly two-thirds of the students at Kabul University were now women… women studying law, medicine, engineering” (135). Hosseini expresses this through the character Laila. Laila's father, Babi, was a professor and strongly insisted that Laila receive an education. He was so devoted that he helped Laila with her homework every evening. Hosseini expressed this when Laila stated that “Babi thought that the only thing the communists had done well – or at least intended to do – ironically, was in the field of education… More specifically the education of women.” (135). For Babi there was nothing more impertinent than the education of women in Afghanistan. He knew that when half the population is illiterate the country cannot adequately aspire to new and better things. Along with the new right to learn, women's obligation to cover their skin has been relaxed across Afghanistan. ... in the middle of the paper ...... visiting with Aziza, Laila saw a middle-aged woman, with her burqa pushed back... Laila recognized the sharp face... Laila remembered this woman who once prohibited female students from covering, stating that women and men were equal, that there was no reason why women should cover if men didn't” (322). Seeing a woman who was as close to a feminist as a woman in Afghanistan could get, seeing her fall to the level that the government wanted her to be, was a crux of the novel that allowed us to really see the effect that the government had about us. women in control of every aspect of their lives. Afghan women have gone through every hardship imaginable. Khaled Hosseini uses his novel A Thousand Splendid Suns to show his readers how women's rights have changed in the last half of the 20th century and how different governments have affected women differently..