Saudi Arabia says its ban on women driving to end in 2018

BEIRUT — Saudi Arabia announced Tuesday that women will be able to legally drive starting next year, moving to shatter a longtime taboo seen as emblematic of the conservative kingdom’s repressive treatment of women.

The royal decree lifting the ban on women operating motor vehicles is one of a number of measures pushed by the conservative kingdom’s reformminded young crown prince, who has pledged to revisit some of the kingdom’s most controversial strictures on women and their place in society.

The move triggered a joyous outpouring on social media from women’s activists and their supporters in the kingdom and around the world, with many using the hashtag #women2drive.

The rejoicing, though, was laced with reminders that Saudi Arabia remains a country in which women face suffocating social strictures — for example, needing permission from male relatives, sometimes their own young sons, to exercise basic freedoms such as travel.

“The rain begins with a single drop,” tweeted Manal Sharif, a Saudi author and professor who was arrested for driving in 2011.

For Saudi women, many of whom are highly educated, the driving ban has for long decades dented dignity, thwarted professional aspirations and rendered the most ordinary of daily activities — getting to work, socializing, running errands — an expensive and frustrating ordeal.

Over the years, female activists who defiantly took the wheel faced vilification by clerics, lost prominent positions and endured sustained harassment by authorities. Following Tuesday’s announcement, jubilant activists posted an “honor roll” of those arrested since 1990, when the protests began, for the punishable offense of trying to drive a car.