Driving Along in My Automobile

I drove into work today.  I typically commute to work by bike, but today I drove.  Sure doesn't seem blog-worthy.  Until I turned on NPR today after I got home from class and was filled in with the news of the day:  woman in Riyadh drives a car.

Wow.  I definitely knew that driving was a privilege.  I wanted to drive SO badly when I was a teenager.  But that was about age, it was about a right of passage, it most certainly was not about gender.  This story is almost too easy to critique in many ways.  I have to return to my thoughts from the other day about how facts don't tell us the whole story.  Even when all of the facts are presented to us.  I mean, this article is really informative and I learned a lot from it.  However, the emotional distance with which this kind of story is put forth makes it hard to be moved by it.  I am definitely touched, and I am definitely pensive, but I'm actually not sure where to go from there.

So, of course I keep trying to read more.  Take in more facts.  It's easy to alienate myself from these women when I'm thinking about my own world, my comfortable lifestyle, etc.  It is harder for me to sit back and really listen to what Saudi women want and to learn what they mean by rejecting western feminism, like this woman: "Alduwaisi says she prefers a “Saudi-Islamic” feminist movement, noting that she wants rights that consider religion and a Sharia-based judicial system."  And then, it makes me reflect on my own feminist ideals, and how frustratingly true it is that many people in foreign countries think that American women are easy.  I've encountered this personally in a number of places.  This perversion of feminism into an empowered sex object is not only reductive, but it perpetuates oh so many of the things that feminism seeks to subvert.

This is where I wish I had something profound to say, and I just don't have anything better to say than what many women far smarter than me are already saying...people like Isobel Coleman and Margot Badran.

So, let me take my own advice and not ask what I would do in these womens' shoes...because I have no idea if I could muster near the courage of these women.  Perhaps the best I can do right now is bring into consciousness the number of rights I have and spend some time thinking about what it took in this country to achieve those rights...because frankly, the kind of social conditioning that results from Sharia law is enough to make my head spin.  One thing I can do is pause in gratitude for the things that the women before me in the U.S. have done to secure the rights I enjoy so much today that I take most of them for granted.  My right to own property since 1900, the right to family planning in 1936, right to equal pay since 1963, and still working to adequately protect ourselves in the home and workplace against abuse.  


It also makes me really excited for my fall class entitled "Global Mobilities" because I have to imagine we will be talking about mobility in this context as well as many others...