Her brother and de facto guardian approves of the plan and allows al-Sharif to drive her car around the Aramco compound-a leniency possible due to her employer’s origins as an American company. Instead, their relationship ends in a divorce, and when al-Sharif travels to the United States for professional training, she also seizes the opportunity to learn how to drive and dispel the widespread belief among Saudi men that women are not competent enough to learn the rules of the road.Īl-Sharif returns to the kingdom hoping to convert her US license into a Saudi one. Male colleagues refuse to tell their wives that they work with a woman, and al-Sharif’s husband-a man she meets at the company-asks her to quit her job to restore her honor and public image. Inside the workplace, challenges continue to proliferate. The situation is not uncommon: most employed Saudi women spend roughly a third of their salary on drivers. Later al-Sharif learns the company shuttle only serves the male section of its workforce, forcing her to hire a Pakistani man to ferry her to work each day in a car she buys herself. They place a pair of men’s shoes at the door of their home, fearful of social reproach. Angry, she and another female employee (who manages to furnish a male guardian’s signature) rent out a home in another city.
Al-Sharif is left in a mad scramble to find suitable housing, but without her father or a husband in the city, no one is willing to permit an unaccompanied woman to rent. In one frustrating incident detailed in Daring to Drive, al-Sharif learns she has been accepted for a job at Aramco only to discover the company is no longer housing any Saudi women inside its compound. husbands, fathers, or brothers) for everyday tasks like renting an apartment or applying for a school. A professional woman working in the IT field, al-Sharif was particularly hamstrung by a multiplicity of obstacles rooted in the kingdom’s male guardianship system, which requires women to obtain permission from male members of their family (i.e.
As one of the few women working at the prestigious Saudi oil company Aramco, Al-Sharif had been accustomed to breaking barriers. Quickly, Al-Sharif’s act of defiance went viral inside the kingdom, as she documents in this month’s Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening.Īt one level, al-Sharif’s narrative is a straight-forward story of protest and nonviolent resistance. and she doesn’t know how to drive.” By uploading a video of herself driving in Saudi Arabia, Al-Sharif hoped to normalize an act considered prosaic by millions of women around the world, yet denied to her in the Gulf state. On May 2011, Manal al-Sharif appeared in a black abaya behind a steering wheel of a car and calmly told an audience in Arabic that her kingdom was home to many educated women, but none with driver’s licenses: “You’ll find a woman who has a PhD or is a professor in a university.
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