Growing up Saudi: in a strict Islamic society like Saudi Arabia, segregation of the sexes is almost total. Part 2: the girls.

• Author: Zoepf, Katherine
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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The dance party in a private Riyadh home is in full swing, with about half the guests--two dozen girls in their late teens--gyrating to the music. Their abayas, black head-to-toe cloaks that all Saudi women must wear in public, are tossed onto chairs around the ornate room. Suddenly, the music stops, and an 18-year-old named Alia steps forward, swaying slightly on her high heals. "Girls, I have something to tell you," she says. "I've gotten engaged!"

There's a chorus of shrieks at the surprise announcement. The girls have been friends since childhood, and Alia will be the first to marry.

Most Saudi girls meet their husbands for the first time the day they become engaged. They are not allowed to date--or even be friends with boys--and their marriages are arranged by their families.

A cell phone picture of Alia's fiance--a 25-year-old military man named Badr--is passed around, and the girls begin pestering Alia for the details of her showfa.

A showfa--literally, a "viewing"--usually occurs on the day that a Saudi girl is engaged. A girl's suitor, when he comes to ask her father for her hand in marriage, has the right to see her dressed without her abaya. In some families, he may have a supervised conversation with her. Ideally, many Saudis say, a showfa is the only time in a woman's adult life that she is seen without her abaya by a man outside her family.

The separation between the sexes in Saudi Arabia is so extreme that it is difficult to overstate. Saudi women must wear black abayas in public at all times. Because women are not allowed to drive, they are driven around in cars with tinted windows. They attend girls-only schools and university departments, and eat in special "family" sections of restaurants, which are partitioned from the areas used by single male diners. Riyadh has women-only gyms, boutiques, and travel agencies, and even a women-only shopping mall. While many Saudi women go to college, very few get jobs afterward--largely because of the logistical difficulty of maintaining rigid gender segregation in the workplace.

Even as Saudi Arabia has taken some small steps toward democratic reforms in recent years (see box, page 11), Saudi women are still denied the basic equality and rights that women in the West, and even in some Arab countries, take for granted. They're not allowed to vote, and they need written permission from a male relative before they can leave the country. Under the Saudi interpretation of Islamic law, a woman's testimony in court does not carry the same weight as a man's.

"Women are treated like perpetual legal minors in Saudi Arabia," says Farida Deif of Human Rights Watch.

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Girls like Alia are well aware of the limits that their conservative society places on their behavior. And, for the most part, they say they do not seriously question those limits.

Most girls say their faith (the strict Saudi interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism) runs very deep, although they argue a bit among themselves about the details--like whether it's OK to have men on your Facebook friends list, or whether a male first cousin should ever be able to see you without your face covered.

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But they seem to regard the idea...