Mavis Nicholson Leno is a gregarious, effervescent woman who calls herself “a lifelong feminist.” In 1997, she became national chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan because she thought it was time “to look beyond our own borders and give a helping hand to other women who are not as far up the road in their struggles.”

Her first priority was to attract the media, then showing “absolute zero interest” in the Taliban’s mistreatment of women. The campaign generated so much publicity, Leno said in an interview, that the U.S. State Department “got more calls on that issue than any other issue for three years running.”

She also credited the campaign with helping to block U.S. recognition of the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legal government and with convincing the energy company UNOCAL to drop plans to build a huge gas pipeline that would have brought the Taliban millions of dollars in revenue. The campaign also helped fund over 1,000 girls’ schools then meeting secretly in Afghan homes.

Leno, the wife of “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno, says she knows some aspects of the campaign have been criticized, but she defends its work.

“We took our entire campaign from information we got from Afghan women because we are perfectly aware that we know nothing about Afghan culture,” she says. “Not only will Afghan women have a different approach to getting equal rights in their culture, but they also probably want a different set of things out of it...All we are trying to do is create a situation in Afghanistan where women can return to the choices they used to have.”

The way that Afghan women dress “is none of our business,” she adds emphatically. “We fully understand that the burqa is a religious option in the same way that Orthodox Jewish women wear wigs and dress modestly. We simply did not want this imposed on women who...lived a more modified and contemporary version of Islamic beliefs.”

Leno says she believes that Muslim criticism of American feminist efforts on behalf of women overseas is based on “a lot of misunderstanding,” but is nonetheless understandable. “It has a lot to do with pride, in a sense. It’s not very rewarding to be a ‘rescued’ or ‘aided’ person,” she says. “I think what women are really trying to say is that you do not understand their lives...I know that there are indigenous feminist movements in all the Middle Eastern countries, so there is a certain amount of defensiveness.”

In the 1970s, Leno read several memoirs of Middle Eastern Muslim women and was left with the impression “that they did lead extraordinarily limited lives.” But their stories also included a “huge emphasis on the tradition of women warriors and brave deeds that women did, and...these stories were told among men and women who considered that it reflected well on their national identity,” she says. “I realized that these women hadn’t been stripped of the idea that they could get up and fight to do something.”

In recent years, Leno adds, she has “learned about the liberal parts of Islam, both towards people in general and women especially...The early suffragists often said that they envied Muslim women because the Qur’an is more liberal to women than the Bible. And it’s true.”

She notes that Muslim women are not the only ones misperceived as helplessly repressed. “That used to happen to Japanese women, this completely ridiculous idea that they’re so subservient,” she says. “It’s insulting to them and out-of-date. I never thought they were subservient because I never thought women anywhere are willingly that way. Even when I was a little girl growing up in the 1950s, I knew it was just a big lie.”

Afghan women in particular are far from helpless or passive, Leno says, quipping: “You do not want to cross an Afghan woman!” And given the interdependence of societies today, she does not rule them out as potential allies.

“Who knows,” she says, “but that we might have to call on them to help us someday.”

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