KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, the Afghan first lady, Zeenat Karzai, was virtually invisible. Sequestered deep inside the high-walled presidential palace, she appeared to have abandoned her career in medicine and was only rarely allowed out in public by President Hamid Karzai.

“People don’t hear from me very much,” Mrs. Karzai acknowledged in a rare interview in 2004.

The new president, Ashraf Ghani, is moving quickly in the opposite direction. During his inauguration speech on Sept. 29, Mr. Ghani’s voice crackled with emotion as he paid loving tribute to his Lebanese-born “life partner and beloved wife,” Rula Ghani.

Mrs. Ghani, who sat in the second row amid a sea of men, wearing dark glasses, nodded back. A murmur ran through the crowd.

It was a brief but symbolically loaded moment. Many Afghan men are reluctant to talk about their wives with other men in private, let alone before a crowd. Not only did Mr. Ghani introduce the first lady publicly, he announced that she would have a public role in advocating for women, children and the internally displaced.