Until June 2018, Saudi Arabia was the only country in the world in which women were forbidden from driving motor vehicles. The Women to Drive Movement ( qiyāda al-marʾa fī as-Suʿūdiyya) was a campaign by Saudi women, whom the government denies many rights to which men are entitled, for the right to drive motor vehicles on public roads. Dozens of women drove in Riyadh in 1990 and were arrested and had their passports confiscated. In 2007, Wajeha al-Huwaider and other women petitioned King Abdullah for the right to drive, and a film of al-Huwaider driving on International Women's Day 2008 attracted international media attention.
In 2011, the Arab Spring motivated some women including al-Huwaider and Manal al-Sharif, to organise a more intensive campaign, and about seventy cases of women driving were documented in the latter half of June. In late September, Shaima Jastania was sentenced to ten lashes for driving in Jeddah, although the sentence was later overturned. Two years later, another campaign to defy the ban targeted 26 October 2013 as the date for women to start driving. Three days before, in a "rare and explicit restating of the ban", an Interior Ministry spokesman warned that "women in Saudi [Arabia] are banned from driving and laws will be applied against violators and those who demonstrate support." Interior Ministry employees warned leaders of the campaign individually not to drive on 26 October, and police road blocks were assembled in Riyadh to check for women driving.
On 26 September 2017, King Salman issued an order to allow women to drive, with new guidelines to be created and implemented by June 2018. Women to drive campaigners were ordered not to contact media and in May 2018, several, including Loujain al-Hathloul, Eman al-Nafjan, Aisha Al-Mana, Aziza al-Yousef and Madeha al-Ajroush, were detained. The ban was officially lifted on 24 June 2018, but many of the women's rights activists remained under arrest. , twelve remained in detention.
Background
According to scholar David Commins, "In 1957, Riyadh pronounced a ban on women driving." , women's rights in Saudi Arabia were highly constrained in comparison to international standards. This included their right to drive cars and other motor vehicles. In 2002, The Economist magazine estimated that the salaries of the approximately 500,000 chauffeurs driving women in Saudi Arabia accounted for 1% of the national income.
History
1990 driving protest
On 6 November 1990, 47 Saudi women in Riyadh drove their cars in protest against the driving ban. They were imprisoned for one day, had their passports confiscated, and some of them lost their jobs as a result of their activism.
2007–2008 petition and YouTube video
In September 2007, the Association for the Protection and Defense of Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia, co-founded by Wajeha al-Huwaider and Fawzia al-Uyyouni, submitted a 1,100-signature petition to King Abdullah asking for women to be allowed to drive.
On International Women's Day 2008, al-Huwaider filmed herself driving, for which she received international media attention after the video was posted on YouTube. Al-Huwaider's drive began within a residential compound, where women are permitted to drive since roadways inside the compound are not considered to be public roads, but she left the compound and drove along a main highway. Al-Huwaider expressed the hope that the ban on women driving would be lifted by International Women's Day in 2009.
In June–July 2007, a Gallup poll found that the majority of Saudi men and women thought that women should be allowed to drive.
2011–2014 campaign
In 2011, a group of women including Manal al-Sharif started a Facebook campaign named "Teach me how to drive so I can protect myself" or Women2Drive that says that women should be allowed to drive. The women said that their campaign was inspired by the Arab Spring.
The campaign called for women to start driving from 17 June 2011. , about 12,000 readers of the Facebook page had expressed their support. Al-Sharif described the action as acting within women's rights, and "not protesting". Wajeha al-Huwaider was impressed by the campaign and decided to help.
A woman from Jeddah, Najla Hariri, started driving in the second week of May 2011, stating "Before in Saudi, you never heard about protests. [But] after what has happened in the Middle East, we started to accept a group of people going outside and saying what they want in a loud voice, and this has had an impact on me."