Wheels of Progress.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia, one of the world's most gender-segregated nations, is ending its controversial ban on women driving. Will other reforms follow?

Imagine living in a country where women aren't allowed to drive. That's always been the law in Saudi Arabia, the conservative Islamic kingdom and longtime ally of the United States. But after years of controversy, the world's only nationwide ban on women driving--which had become a global symbol of the oppression of women--is coming to an end.

The change, announced by royal decree in late September, will take effect in June 2018. Saudi women, some of whom have been fighting for the right to drive for nearly 30 years, say they're thrilled with the change.

"It is amazing," says Fawziah al-Bakr, a Saudi university professor. In 1990, al-Bakr was one of the 47 women who participated in the kingdom's first protest against the ban. After driving around the Saudi capital, Riyadh, the women were arrested and some lost their jobs.

"Since that day, Saudi women have been asking for the right to drive, and finally it arrived," al-Bakr says. "We have been waiting for a very long time."

Arranged Marriages & No Dating

Saudi Arabia (see map, p. 26), home to Islam's holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, is an absolute monarchy ruled according to Islamic law, and it's probably the most gender-segregated nation in the world. Saudi officials and clerics had provided many explanations for the ban. Some said it was inappropriate in Saudi culture for women to drive, or that male drivers wouldn't know how to handle having women in cars next to them. Others argued that ending the ban would lead to promiscuity and the collapse of the Saudi family. One cleric claimed--with no evidence--that driving harmed women's ovaries.

The ban on driving is just one of many restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia. As soon as they're considered adults, Saudi women must wear black head-to-toe cloaks called abayas (see photos) in public at all times. They attend girls-only schools and university classes, and they eat in special "family" sections of restaurants, which are partitioned from the areas used by single men. Riyadh has women-only gyms, boutiques, and even a shopping mall just for women. While many Saudi women go to college, few get jobs afterward--largely because of the logistics of maintaining gender segregation in the workplace.

Saudi girls aren't allowed to date or even be friends with boys--and their marriages are arranged. Most Saudi girls meet their husbands for the first time on the day they become engaged.

And Saudi women are denied the basic equality and rights that women in the West, and even in many Arab countries, take for granted. Under the nation's so-called...