According to a recent write up in Wall Street Journal who reported on the incident, dozens of Saudi women took to the roads around Saudi Arabia on Saturday October 26, 2013, defying a new surge of warnings from the government, mosque pulpits and radio channels to drop their challenge to a de facto ban on driving by women.
By mid-afternoon Saturday, about 40 women had defied the ban by driving in cities around the kingdom, according to their text messages and emails to other supporters of a recently-revived grassroots campaign for the legalization of Saudi women’s driving.
A half-dozen posted videos online purportedly showing themselves driving Saturday.
Although no law explicitly prohibits women from driving in Saudi Arabia, the government has refused to give them licenses.
Campaign organizers had set Saturday as a main day for women drivers to challenge the ban by driving themselves about on errands.
In total, more than 100 women countrywide have reported taking the wheel since women revived a more than two-decade effort to roll back Saudi Arabia’s prohibition on women’s driving, according to Eman al-Nafjan, a supporter of the campaign in the capital, Riyadh. Videos posted on YouTube this week have shown Saudi fathers filming daughters at the wheel and Saudi sons teaching mothers to drive.
For the full article, extended from this excerpt, head over to the WSJ for the rest of the story. Photo from AP.
Renee Blodgett is the founder of We Blog the World. The site combines the magic of an online culture and travel magazine with a global blog network and has contributors from every continent in the world. Having lived in 10 countries and explored nearly 80, she is an avid traveler, and a lover, observer and participant in cultural diversity.
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Her passion for art, storytelling and photography led to the launch of Magic Sauce Photography, which is a visual extension of her writing, the result of which has led to producing six photo books: Galapagos Islands, London, South Africa, Rome, Urbanization and Ecuador.
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