Social media has allowed the "Women2Drive" movement to organize and to spread the idea that women have a right to drive



Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow

The last time that Saudi women got behind the wheel en masse to protest the law forbidding them from driving, all they won were punitive work and travel restrictions and a tightening of the already severe law. But that was twenty years ago, and the world has changed significantly since then, even if Saudi Arabia has tried its best not to. Across the Arab world, activists are using social media to organize protests and to disseminate evidence of Arab governments' brutal crackdowns. Saudi women, not the helpless dummies their country often takes them for, are using those same tools and techniques to different ends.

Today, as Saudi women drive the Kingdom's city streets, they are using social media to broadcast their act and to encourage others to follow. On Twitter, they announce their intention to drive, sometimes even including the time and place, often encouraging mothers and sisters to do the same. They post photographs of their drives, both to demonstrate their civil disobedience and to normalize what can be a shocking sight in Saudi Arabia. Some are even posting YouTube videos of the drives, clips that are both banal and thrilling for their assertion of the slightest independence for women in a country where male permission is required to work, go to school, sometimes even visit the hospital.