You Can Run For Election, You Can Vote…If You Can Get There

When I read the news that women in Saudi Arabia had been given the right to both run for election and vote without the approval of a male guardian, I was at first excited and then I felt like I was revisiting that famous Seinfeld episode with the rental car. “You know how to take the reservation. You just don’t know how to hold the reservation.”

Saudi Arabian King Abdullah has lifted the ban on women being able to run for election as well as the ban on women voting, but women are still not allowed to travel, work, study abroad, marry, get divorced or gain admittance to a public hospital without permission from a male guardian.

Hence my Seinfeldian experience. Unless the woman who runs for office actually has the support of the men in her life she can run, but how will she actually hold office? She can’t drive, travel or work for that matter. And Saudi Arabian women have been given the right to vote, but if voting takes place a step outside their doors, unless a man gives permission to travel, they will not be able to exercise this right.

The King might as well have given women the right to fly to the moon. I’m all for ‘something is better than nothing’ but I just can’t see the silver lining in this. King Abdullah has pushed for changes in women’s right, but this seems like a hollow gesture, unless he has a master-mind plan of easing women’s rights slowly into their culture so that it creates limited friction among the ultra conservative.  Maybe the case as the lifting of the ban doesn’t go into effect until 2015.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

In the meantime – congratulations to the women of Saudia Arabia for winning the right to run for office as well as winning the right to vote. I hope you can freely exercise both.