There is much excitement over Saudi Arabia’s announcement that they will finally allow women to get driver’s licenses. The news was delivered live on the kingdom’s state television and was a public relations coup. The change in law was hailed by the U.S. State Department as “a great step in the right direction.”
But before women in the kingdom get too excited and go out and buy their first soccer-mom minivan, they still have to contend with the country’s repressive guardianship laws, which give men the right to control the movements of their wives and daughters.
Even a woman’s son has the right to dictate where his mother can travel to or what medical procedures she can undergo. Depending on the men in her life, a woman may be restricted to driving only to pick up the groceries or becoming her husband’s personal chauffeur. This may be “a great step,” but it’s not the crumbling of the Berlin Wall or even a chisel strike on one of its blocks.
This is first and foremost a brilliant stroke of PR by a country that still showcases beheadings and amputations in public squares. Issuing driver’s licenses to women is a clever promotional advertisement that Saudi Arabia is catching up with the rest of the civilized world in terms of human rights, but it will not change the perception of many who still see the country as the prime exporter of radical militant Islam throughout the world.
The new law conveniently provides a distraction that allows diplomats in Washington and London to talk positively about the “progress” Saudi Arabia is making in the area of human rights while ignoring their bloody bombardment of Yemen and their ruthless crackdown on dissidents.
While women in Saudi Arabia will soon be able to experience sitting in soul-deadening traffic jams, dealing with road rage, and visiting the DMV, one would have to be extremely optimistic to see this as a first step in any kind of women’s liberation movement.
The country’s Sharia law virtually guarantees that the women of Saudi Arabia will never experience anything approaching a free and autonomous life, untethered to the whims of their husbands or fathers.
And, of course, forbidding women from driving was tremendously inconvenient to their husbands. Who wants to drive and pick up their wives everyday? This new law is certainly a great relief to those men who have been driving their sisters, mothers and wives around town to their jobs, shopping malls, and hair salons.
Now all the men need to do is grant the women in their lives permission to leave the house and make sure they don’t deviate from the approved route. Everyone wins.
Even the Saudi PR machine that enlists a team of lobbyists in Washington to make sure that those multi-billion-dollar arms deals keep coming has scored a victory. Who has time to talk about the suffering of the people of Yemen or the state-sanctioned beheadings and amputations during this time of celebration?
So while any reasonable person will welcome this new law that will allow women to drive, it serves as a sad reminder of just how oppressive and authoritarian the Saudi monarchy is and how far the people there are from enjoying a free and full life.
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