Saudi Women Defy Driving Ban On Roads and Online

Social media has allowed the "Women2Drive" movement to organize and to spread the idea that women have a right to drive

The last time that Saudi women got behind the wheel en masse to protest the law forbidding them from driving, all they won were punitive work and travel restrictions and a tightening of the already severe law. But that was twenty years ago, and the world has changed significantly since then, even if Saudi Arabia has tried its best not to. Across the Arab world, activists are using social media to organize protests and to disseminate evidence of Arab governments' brutal crackdowns. Saudi women, not the helpless dummies their country often takes them for, are using those same tools and techniques to different ends.

Today, as Saudi women drive the Kingdom's city streets, they are using social media to broadcast their act and to encourage others to follow. On Twitter, they announce their intention to drive, sometimes even including the time and place, often encouraging mothers and sisters to do the same. They post photographs of their drives, both to demonstrate their civil disobedience and to normalize what can be a shocking sight in Saudi Arabia. Some are even posting YouTube videos of the drives, clips that are both banal and thrilling for their assertion of the slightest independence for women in a country where male permission is required to work, go to school, sometimes even visit the hospital.

The social media world has proven a fitting forum for what its activists call the "Women2Drive" movement, and not just because pro-democracy Arab uprisings are using the same services. The Saudi campaign began on May 20, when 32-year-old information technology consultant Manal al-Sharif posted a video to YouTube of her driving. She was soon arrested and spent a week in prison. Though it can be difficult for women to congregate freely in a society where they have no independent means of transportation, social media has given them the tools to organize today's mass driving demonstrations.

Above are a handful of the many photos of women driving today in Saudi Arabia. Below are a small selection of the videos and tweets that are a part of the same movement. Though there is no central physical location where the women can organize, no Tahrir Square, they are instead congregating online, on Twitter and Facebook, so far to remarkable effect.