“The incident catalyzed a moral campaign meant to reinforce the feminine ideal of a pious secluded wife and mother,” Jaime Kucinskas, who teaches a course on religion and society at Indiana University, told me in an email. “The state-funded media released a television program showing little girls singing how they were women and did not drive cars.”

Today, not only are the country’s women prohibited from chauffeuring themselves around, they’re also discouraged from traveling alone or using public transportation. Driver’s licenses are issued only to men.

Women’s-rights groups have staged several small demonstrations to push for driving rights in recent years, but they’ve so far made little headway. The newest campaign calls for women to drive on October 26 in protest, but the Saudi government shut down the campaign’s website.

More broadly, there is strong resistance to Saudi women participating in public life, including working jobs that would put them in contact with men. At least 34 percent of Saudi women who say they want to work are unemployed, a rate that’s just 7 percent for the country’s job-seeking men.

This is in spite of the country’s opening dozens of new colleges in the past decade and providing scholarships for thousands of Saudi women to travel overseas to study.

Once these women return home, they face a severely restrictive environment. In many families, women are not able to leave home without a male guardian or to mingle casually with the opposite sex.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah promoted some reforms in the country in 2009, appointing a female deputy minister and opening a mixed-sex university. However, the country’s clerics decried his actions as too progressive.

Sheikh Salman al-Duwaysh said women had “abandoned their basic duties such as housekeeping, bringing up children ... and replaced this by beautifying themselves and wantonness,” to name just one example uncovered by Wikileaks.

Some women-only businesses that don’t involve direct customer contact have since been created, and in a first, the Kingdom licensed its first four female lawyers yesterday. Still, it’s rare to see women working in public, and many stores and restaurants are divided by sex.

Women are expected to have the consent of their guardian (a husband usually, or otherwise a father or close male relative) for virtually every activity—including work, school, and travel.

Driving is a direct extension of this type of religion-based segregation. As one Saudi man explained to a Christian Science Monitor reporter, “What would happen if a woman got in a car accident? Then she would be forced to deal with the male driver of the other car, a stranger, with no oversight."

“The ideal of feminine piety is associated with home, the need for protection and subsequent seclusion,” Kucinskas said. “Driving symbolizes the opposite: freedom in the public sphere.”