Saudi ban reversal big win for gender equality
Hallelujah. Women in Saudi Arabia are going to drive. According to a new royal decree, the ultra-religious kingdom is ditching its long-standing ban on women drivers, granting Saudi women the right to get behind the wheel come June next year. But here’s the really extraordinary bit: not only will Saudi women be able to hit the road next summer, they will be able to drive alone.
Of course there are still a great many things Saudi women can’t do alone — or at all. Since the kingdom’s announcement, many critics were quick to point out that despite its apparent change of heart on women behind the wheel, Saudi Arabia may remain only second to Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, the Republic of Gilead (of The Handmaid’s Tale) in its unapologetic oppression of the female gender.
And they’re right. In Saudi Arabia, though a woman may soon be able to drive her family’s Honda Civic off the dealership lot, she is still prohibited from doing the following without a say-so from a male guardian: opening a bank account, getting married, getting divorced, having elective surgery, applying for a pass- port. Women in the kingdom aren’t allowed to socialize freely with members of the opposite sex and this one won’t surprise you: they must appear veiled in public at all times. All in all, the Middle Eastern kingdom is a lousy place to be if you’re a lady, brand new Honda Civic or not.
But the Honda Civic helps a lot. For proof we need only look to history. The car has always been a driving force in feminism not merely because it gives women freedom of movement but a place in which they can move and think at the same time absent interference from home and public life. In other words, under the new law Saudi women drivers will have access to a roving room of their own, or as historian Margaret Walsh put it in an essay about American women’s increased bent for driving in the decades after the invention of the car, they will have access to “the automobile as a type of second home.”
This is no small thing. The right to be alone in a car isn’t just a win for practicality (under the new policy Saudi women will no longer have to rely on a male guardian or a paid driver to get to the grocery store). It’s psychologically liberating, too, because it affords women a type of privacy and solace previously only afforded to men. For anyone who believes that all a woman requires for peace and contentment is a hot bath in the evening, here’s Walsh to disabuse you of that notion: “As one farmwoman in the 1920s told an inspector from the United States Department of Agriculture who inquired why her family had bought a car rather than putting indoor plumbing into their home, ‘You can’t go to town in a bathtub.’ ”
You can’t go sightseeing in a bathtub either. When women began driving in large numbers in the United States in the early 20th century, they didn’t just whip over to the store to pick up some groceries. They went exploring. “It is clear that many women sought and enjoyed the independence provided by the automobile and welcomed the opportunity to travel,” writes Martin Wachs, an engineering and planning professor in an essay called “The Automobile and Gender: An Historical Perspective.”
“Many books appeared presenting accounts of women’s trips across country without men. For example, the first commercially successful book published by Emily Post, who later became a well-known authority on etiquette, was an account of her cross-country journey in an automobile.”
In fact, despite male obsession with women-can’t-drive jokes, it was a woman, not a man, who embarked on what is believed to be the first ever road trip. German engi- neer Karl Benz is widely credited with inventing the original motor car in the late 1800s, but it was his wife Bertha Benz who actually thought to take the thing for a good long spin. The story goes that one morning in 1888, without his knowledge or permission, Mrs. Benz drove her husband’s car roughly 90 kilometres to visit her mother in another city. Not only was this the furthest anyone at the time had ever driven a car; Benz’s surprise road trip changed the way many people saw the automobile. “She proved the car was a tool, not a toy,” writes Andrew Frankel in a story about Benz published in the Telegraph earlier this year.
Of course Saudi Arabia is a very different place than Europe or North America in the decades after the car was invented. Thanks to the country’s draconian male guardianship laws, it’s highly unlikely that come June, Saudi women will immediately take off with their husbands’ convertibles and re-enact Thelma and Louise in the Arabian Desert. But the elimination of the driving ban is a major win for gender equality in the state because history shows us that when women take the wheel, all of us, men included, move forward. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.