Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Back to Opinion

Driving While Female

The video is a shaky, homemade effort, obviously shot from the rear passenger seat of a car as it carefully drives around the streets of Dammam in eastern Saudi Arabia. At the wheel is a woman in large, dark sunglasses, her head tightly covered by a black scarf, talking animatedly with a friend next to her while she navigates the streets like a pro.

Except that for this act of defiance, Manal al-Sharif was thrown in jail for nine days, released on May 30 only after agreeing not to participate in a national protest against the ban on women drivers on June 17. Oh, and her cell phone was turned off.

That this abhorrent restriction exists in a supposedly civilized country defies reason. In the video, al-Sharif and her companion detail the consequences of the ban on ordinary Saudi women. A friend pays one-third of her salary just for a driver. Another was driven by her 10-year-old son, and unsafely at that. Al-Sharif was harassed by her own driver, as are other women. Many simply remain imprisoned in their homes, without the means to pay for what are effectively chaperons.

There’s nothing Islamic or even traditionally Saudi about this ban, instituted in 1990 after a peaceful but audacious demonstration by prominent women on the streets of Riyadh. The world should carefully monitor the Women2Drive protest June 17 and support the dignity and purpose of Saudi women who merely want the right to navigate their lives on their own.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.