{"id":2804,"date":"2011-06-17T22:45:46","date_gmt":"2011-06-18T03:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=2804"},"modified":"2011-06-17T22:45:46","modified_gmt":"2011-06-18T03:45:46","slug":"global-mama-driving-solo-in-saudi-arabia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2011\/06\/17\/global-mama-driving-solo-in-saudi-arabia\/","title":{"rendered":"GLOBAL MAMA: Driving solo in Saudi Arabia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Arab spring took a different turn in Saudi Arabia with today\u2019s #Women2Drive campaign.\u00a0 Organizing via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/Women2drive-Manal-and-Bertha-Woman2drive-17-June-Saudi-Arabia\/176962935691371?ref=ts&amp;sk=wall\">Facebook<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/women2drive\">Twitter<\/a>, Saudi women hit city roads in protest of the ban on women\u2019s driving.\u00a0 Many of them asked their passengers to film their drives and uploaded the videos to YouTube, following the example of Manal al-Sharif, a single mother who posted a video of herself driving solo last month:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"349\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sowNSH_W2r0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Manal al-Sharif was arrested and jailed, but this didn\u2019t stop other women from taking the car keys.\u00a0 <em>The New Yorker<\/em> has aggregated several of the videos from today\u2019s campaign <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/online\/blogs\/newsdesk\/2011\/06\/videos-of-women-daring-to-drive.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The right to drive is one of several rights denied to women in Saudi Arabia, the only Muslim country in which women cannot drive. \u00a0In a powerful <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/06\/13\/opinion\/13Milani.html\">opinion essay<\/a> about this act of civil disobedience, Farzaneh Milani argues that restricting women\u2019s mobility is about more than driving cars:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It is about dominating, excluding and subordinating women.\u00a0 It is about barring them from political activities, preventing their active participation in the public sector, and making it difficult for them to fully exercise the rights Islam grants them to own and manage their own property. \u00a0It is about denying women the basic human right to move about freely.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And while <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/06\/18\/world\/middleeast\/18saudi.html?_r=1\">The New York Times<\/a><\/em> reported that today\u2019s protest was hardly earth-shattering\u2014apparently only several dozen women drove\u2014I prefer to think of them, as Milani does, as freedom riders heralding future change:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>the women defying the ban on motorized mobility are in fact demanding an eventual overhaul of the entire Saudi political system. They want not just to drive but to remap the political geography of their country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I would only add that I\u2019m not surprised that Manal al-Sharif is a single working mother. You go, global mamas!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Arab spring took a different turn in Saudi Arabia with today\u2019s #Women2Drive campaign.\u00a0 Organizing via Facebook and Twitter, Saudi women hit city roads in protest of the ban on women\u2019s driving.\u00a0 Many of them asked their passengers to film their drives and uploaded the videos to YouTube, following the example of Manal al-Sharif, a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1916,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21105],"tags":[21123,1399,21543,336],"class_list":["post-2804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-mama","tag-women2drive","tag-global","tag-manal-al-sharif","tag-saudi-arabia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1916"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2804\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}