Last Thursday, thousands of men and a few hundred women in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif cheered wildly for Ms. Sarobi, after only polite applause for the presidential candidate.

“She pretty much rocked the show,” said Haseeb Humayoon, a Rassoul campaign aide.

Ms. Sarobi explained, “People want some change, and a woman on the ticket is a change for them.”

Fawzia Koofi, a politician and rights advocate, at one point said she would be running as a presidential candidate in this election, but she missed by a year the minimum age of 40 when candidates were registered. She recalled the days when politically active Afghan women were relegated to chanting slogans from behind privacy screens. “A woman for vice president? Eleven years ago, even dreaming about this was impossible,” Ms. Koofi said.

On the campaign trail, all of the eight presidential candidates still in the race have at least paid some lip service to supporting causes important to women — even Abdul Rab Rassoul Sayyaf, an extremely traditionalist Pashtun candidate and warlord who as a member of Parliament was a bitter opponent of a law intended to criminalize violence against women.

For his part, Mr. Sayyaf said he would “reconsider his past actions in view of respect for women’s rights.”

Most of the candidates have appeared at women’s groups to answer questions, and participated in debates on women’s issues. “This time from the beginning all of them have been talking about women’s rights,” said Hasina Safi, head of the Afghanistan Women’s Network, a coalition of women’s groups. “They have really figured out that women count.”

Partly that is because women have become particularly well-organized in recent years, nurtured by generous international funding for their organizations and causes, and requirements by donors that projects should be gender-sensitive, with such measures as equal-opportunity units, gender equality training and guaranteed employment of a percentage of women.