Riyadh, July 02: One small step in the lingerie store augurs well for more freedoms, writes Ellen Knickmeyer.
On the segregated ”ladies’ level” at the Kingdom Centre shopping mall in Riyadh, winds of change for Saudi women are blowing among the racks of bras. In one of several potentially momentous moves to ease strictures on women, Saudi Arabia is changing job rules so that female staff can serve female customers in lingerie stores.
It took a boycott, online campaigns and intervention by King Abdullah to counter fatwas on lingerie service, so that women wouldn’t have to talk to male shop staff about cup sizes and muffin tops.
These are hopeful times for supporters of greater freedom for women in deeply conservative Saudi Arabia. The government has opened more jobs and education for women and, last week, responded surprisingly leniently to the most significant protest in decades against the ban on women driving.
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”This is something great! A huge change,” 18-year-old Latifa al-Fahed says as she scans the lingerie racks at the Kingdom Centre’s Debenhams department store. King Abdullah’s edict, yet to be implemented, requires female staff to sell ”women’s necessities”, even in malls where men are present.
Even conservative women applaud the lingerie measure. ”I’m married, so I wanted to buy something a little sexy,” says Fatima, a 22-year-old in a niqab. ”These are sensitive issues, and I definitely would not buy from a man.”
Saudi activists argue that each pending change, while small on the surface, should be viewed as chipping away at the segregation that crushes the job prospects of most of the kingdom’s more than 10 million Saudi women and drains fortunes from them and their families.
Smashing one barrier may lead to breakthroughs in other fields, says Princess Ameerah al-Taweel, 28, an outspoken advocate of women being educated, employed and able to drive.
”This step will lead to other steps, and people will get used to the sight of women working,” the princess says. ”This is a big step for us. Things are happening, but we want them to happen faster.”
While 60 per cent of Saudis pursuing higher education are women, it is estimated that 75 per cent of women with degrees are unemployed. The chief economist at Banque Saudi Fransi in Riyadh, John Sfakianakis, says it is becoming an economic necessity for Saudi households to have more than one wage earner. Women’s issues have often strained Saudi society. In 1990, when 47 women staged the last significant demonstration over driving, angry crowds mobbed government buildings in protest. One of the women, Fawziah al-Bakr, recalled how mosque speakers were calling their names from minarets, urging that they be killed.
The response to this month’s driving protest has been more muted – a few traffic tickets. Then Bakr, now a university professor, stops herself and slaps her forehead.
”Oh, my God,” she moans. ”I can’t believe it’s 20 years later and we’re still talking about women driving.”
–Agencies–