The guardianship system gives a woman a legal status resembling that of a minor. Illustration by Eiko Ojala

In September, 2014, Mohra Ferak, twenty-two years old and in her final year at Dar Al-Hekma University, in the Saudi port city of Jeddah, was asked for advice by a woman who had heard that she was studying law. The woman was the principal of a primary school for girls, and she told Ferak that she had grown frustrated by her inability to help children in her charge who had been raped; over the years, there had been many such cases among her students. Regardless of whether the perpetrator was a relative or the family driver, the victim’s parents invariably declined to press charges. A Saudi family’s honor rests, to a considerable degree, on its ability to protect the virginity of its daughters. Parents, fearing ruined marriage prospects, chose silence, which meant that men who had raped girls as young as eight went unpunished, and might act again. And for some of the girls, the principal added, the secrecy only amplified the trauma. She asked Ferak if there was anything that she, as principal, could do to help them.

“I told her, ‘You can go to court and ask the judge to make the proceedings private and save the girl’s reputation,’ ” Ferak recalled one recent afternoon. We were sitting in a modish Lebanese restaurant near the Jeddah corniche, sharing plates of tricornered spinach pastries and stuffed grape leaves across a black butcher-block table. The call to afternoon prayer had sounded several minutes earlier, and the restaurant, in accordance with law, had locked its doors and dimmed the lights. The “family section”—the secluded area for women that restaurants serving both genders must provide, where female diners who cover their faces can eat comfortably—was quiet. Except for a waiter, we had the place to ourselves. Ferak is slight, with a lilting voice and a round, bespectacled face framed by a tightly wound black shayla. Head scarves, which Saudi women typically wear unfastened, have a way of slipping off, and Ferak fidgeted with hers as she described her conversation with the principal, repeatedly tugging it back down into its proper position.

The principal was amazed to learn that Saudi plaintiffs can request closed court proceedings. She began peppering Ferak with legal questions, many of them about how to advise teachers who were in abusive marriages, or whose ex-husbands wouldn’t allow their children to visit. The principal was in her early fifties, which meant that, as a school administrator, she was among the best-educated Saudi women of her generation. Well into the nineteen-eighties, according to UNESCO, fewer than half of Saudi girls between the ages of six and eleven had received any education outside the home. But, Ferak said, it quickly became clear that the woman knew little about the fundamental principles of Saudi law.

Ferak had been a middling student during her first three years at Dar Al-Hekma, an all-female university. A week after talking with the principal, she went to Olga Nartova, who chairs the law department, and described the conversation. Nartova, a thirty-six-year-old trade-law specialist from Moscow, had previously found Ferak to be bright but unmotivated, like many girls from well-off families. But Ferak spoke about women’s rights with a seriousness of purpose that Nartova had never seen in any student at Dar Al-Hekma.

“It completely transformed Mohra,” she said. One of the principal’s stories, concerning a young girl at her school who was the target of persistent sexual abuse by one of her brothers, had particularly incensed Ferak, Nartova recalled: “The principal, she called the mother in and said, ‘Do you know what your son is doing?’ And the mother said, ‘Yes, well, better that he do it to her than that he do it to a stranger.’ So the principal asked Mohra what to do. She reports to the police? She reports to the court? What?”

With Nartova’s encouragement, Ferak began planning a series of free public lectures at the university, aimed at women and delivered by distinguished legal scholars and lawyers. The presentations were designed to provide basic information about Saudi women’s legal rights. “Since I was very young, and started noticing how women are treated in this country, I’ve had this feeling about women,” Ferak said. “I don’t like anyone to underestimate us.” But women’s rights aren’t a subject of mainstream public discussion in the kingdom, and she wondered whether anyone besides the principal would attend. She also worried about how the experts would react to being approached by a student.

Ferak compiled a list of topics that she felt were of particular importance to local women, and she began contacting lawyers. The first lecture in the series, which Ferak called Hawa’a’s Rights (Hawa’a is the Arabic version of the name Eve), was publicized on Twitter and took place on the evening of April 15th. Several dozen attendees learned about crimes perpetrated against women on social media, a topic of special concern in a country where single people of opposite sexes cannot spend time together without risking arrest, and where pressure on women to cover their faces in public can be so intense that the most innocent head shot can serve as a tool of blackmail.

The second Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, on April 26th, addressed personal-status law, the category of Saudi law that governs marriage, divorce, guardianship, and inheritance. The lecturer, Bayan Mahmoud Zahran—a thirty-year-old Jeddah attorney who, in January, 2014, became the first Saudi woman to open a law firm—was scheduled to begin speaking at five o’clock, launching an evening of discussion that would run until nine. Late that afternoon, Ferak arrived at the university to find a long black line of abaya-clad women waiting to be seated.

Institutions and businesses that serve Saudi women are carefully guarded, so as to prevent ikhtilat, illegal gender mixing, and the only male employees of a Saudi girls’ school or women’s college are its security officers, who are stationed at the checkpoint outside, inspecting identification cards and keeping watch for male intruders. The security guards were overwhelmed by the turnout for the second Hawa’a’s Rights event. Ferak corralled several friends, and they spent the half hour beforehand rushing from classroom to classroom, looking for extra chairs to carry down to the space that had been reserved. They filled the aisles and the back of the room with additional seats, straining the hall’s intended capacity of a hundred and twenty.

“There were students, mothers, teachers, lots of workers in shops—really, every kind of woman, even doctors from the university,” Ferak told me. “All of us were just looking at each other, thinking, Is this even possible?” When Nartova came out of her office, a few minutes before Zahran’s talk, she saw women struggling to find standing room in the back and on the stairs, while others sat on the floor by the dais. Ferak texted a photo of the packed hall to her father, who had shared her initial doubts about interest in the lectures. He teasingly texted back, “Are you trying to make women fight with their husbands?” The third Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, a practical introduction to Saudi labor law for women just entering the workforce, attracted a still larger crowd. The university did not schedule a fourth event.