At a time when women were still largely marginalised in Afghan society, Ratebzad rose to be one of the country’s first publicly outspoken women’s rights activists in the 1950s and 60s. Exploits such as leading a group of unveiled female nurses to treat male patients in one of the first instances of uncovered garb for Afghan working women, and a march to pressure the Government into formally celebrating International Women’s day lead to huge defamation campaigns against her by the conservative circles of Afghan society.

She became one of the first Afghan women ever to be elected into parliament in 1965, and she fell in with the PDPA following 1978’s Saur Revolution, becoming the driving force behind an era that yielded the best living standards ever experienced by Afghan women. Fighting gender inequality in the reactionary and conservative rural parts of the country was often a losing battle, however, Ratebzad and PDPA made formal commitments to fighting illiteracy in women and teaching them valuable vocational skills - for the first time extending women’s rights (which were previously restricted to the urban elite) de jure to the entire nation.

Ratebzad was forced to leave Afghanistan in 1992 to escape Mujahideen fighters and would never return to her homeland in her lifetime. The PDPA era still remains the closest Afghan women have gotten to true liberation.