A women’s revolution has begun in Saudi Arabia, although it may not be immediately evident. This fall, only a few dozen women got behind the wheel to demand the right to drive. Every female Saudi still has a male guardian—usually a father or husband—and few openly question the need for one. Adult women must have their guardians’ permission to study, to travel, and to marry, which effectively renders them legal minors. It took a decree from King Abdullah to put tens of thousands of them into the workforce. For the first time, they are interacting daily with men who are not family members, as cashiers in supermarkets and as salesclerks selling abayas and cosmetics and underwear.

One afternoon in late October, at the Sahara Mall, in central Riyadh, the Asr prayer was just ending. The lights were still dimmed in the mall’s marble corridor, but the Nayomi lingerie store had been unlocked. The rattle of steel and aluminum could be heard as security grilles were raised over nearby storefronts. Twenty-seven-year-old Nermin adjusted a box of perfume on a tiered display near the entrance, then turned to greet six saleswomen as they filed out of a storeroom, preparing to resume their shift. Nermin started working at Nayomi eighteen months ago, as a salesclerk herself. She was warm and engaging with customers, and was recently promoted to a position in which she oversees hiring and staff training for Nayomi stores across four Saudi provinces. All the employees wore long black abayas and niqabs, which revealed nothing but their eyes. They positioned themselves among the racks of bras, underpants, nightgowns, and foundation garments—black-cloaked figures moving against a backdrop of purples, reds, and innumerable shades of pink.

Nermin is one of the Nayomi chain’s longest-serving female employees. She was hired nearly a year after King Abdullah issued a decree, in June of 2011, that women were to replace all men working in lingerie shops. Early in 2012, on a visit to the Nayomi store in a mall near her house with her younger sister, Ruby, Nermin noticed a poster advertising positions for saleswomen. The sisters had never considered working, since there were virtually no jobs for women without a college degree or special skills. Nermin and Ruby mostly spent their days watching television, exercising, and surfing the Internet. In a blisteringly hot city with few parks, the mall was one of the only places to go for a walk. They filled out applications on the spot, and their family encouraged the idea. “I was surprised to find that I like to work,” Nermin said. Ruby, who got a job at the same store, is now the manager there. She wore its key on a yellow lanyard around her neck; pink-trimmed platform sneakers were visible beneath the hem of her abaya. After graduating from high school, she had spent four years feeling increasingly trapped at home, she said. “Nayomi gave me the chance to go on with life.”

Many store owners quickly discovered that the saleswomen needed coaching on even the most basic interactions with customers. Unnecessary contact among men and women who aren’t close relatives is forbidden in the Kingdom, and the government devotes vast resources to maintaining strict separation between the sexes. There are women-only shopping malls, women-only travel agencies, and women-only sections of banks and government offices. Even in modest Saudi restaurants, tables for families are often surrounded by curtains or screens, so that women wearing niqabs may uncover their faces and eat.

All women—including Westerners—are required to wear abayas and head scarves in public, but the niqab is usually a matter of personal preference. Various saleswomen told me that they wear it to protect themselves from harassment. Nermin wears it only at work, but she doesn’t think it’s an impediment to communicating with customers. She pointed to two women who were welcoming shoppers. I could tell from their eyes that they were smiling.

At Nayomi, most customers remain fully covered even while being fitted for bras and body shapers. Nermin showed me how salesclerks take measurements over the layers of a woman’s abaya and other clothing. This is one of the skills she teaches employees, along with how to promote new products and how to be solicitous but not intrusive. “You have to squeeze her a little,” Nermin said, demonstrating on her own bust line. Her trainees sometimes balk at that kind of intimacy with a stranger. “It’s normal,” she said, of their reserve. “It’s their first time out of the house.” The following week, at a vocational training center run by a women’s charitable society called Al Nahda, I watched as the instructor in a course for prospective saleswomen showed her students a wide smile, appropriate for female customers, and a split-second, perfunctory smile for men.

In 2005, the Saudi Minister of Labor, Ghazi al-Gosaibi, first announced a policy of staffing lingerie shops with women. The country has one of the world’s lowest rates of female participation in the labor force. At that time, according to the World Bank, it was eighteen per cent. Virtually all the Saudi women who worked had college and graduate degrees, and were employed in schools, where men were not permitted to teach girls, or in hospitals, because conservative families prefer that female doctors and nurses treat their wives, sisters, and daughters. Lingerie shops seemed a relatively uncontroversial place to start expanding workplace opportunities for women, and Gosaibi gave the stores a year to replace their all-male staffs. Three lingerie shops in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s most liberal city, did hire women, but they were quickly closed by the religious police. Conservatives argued that even if the shops specialized in women’s products the presence of female employees would encourage ikhtilat—mixing of the sexes in public. Gosaibi’s policy was not implemented.

Three years later, Reem Asaad, a lecturer in finance at Dar al-Hekma, a women’s college in Jeddah, had a mortifying experience when she was shopping for underpants. A male clerk loudly scolded her for examining the merchandise without his help. Afterward, she heard about Gosaibi’s initiative, and decided to organize a boycott of lingerie shops until they began hiring women.

Asaad, who has three young daughters, believes in female empowerment through work, but she did not emphasize women’s rights in her campaign. She told me, “You don’t use the word ‘rights.’ ” Instead, she disarmed her opponents by deploying the notion of shame, which has great resonance in Saudi society. On her Facebook page and in leaflets distributed by her students, she argued that no decent Saudi woman should have to talk about bras and panties with a man. Within months, Asaad had thousands of supporters, who said, on e-mail and on Facebook, “We’re behind you, this is shameful.” Some men told her they didn’t like their wives and daughters discussing such intimate matters with strangers.

Almost every Saudi woman appears to have had an experience like Reem Asaad’s. A young academic told me with wry indignation about a lingerie salesman who eyed the outline of her breasts under her abaya, then told her that she’d need a larger bra size than the one she had requested. Nermin mimed the furtive way that women shopped for underwear: heads ducked, grabbing whatever was easily accessible. “You’d take anything,” she said. Several women told me that badly fitting underwear, purchased in haste, is a long-standing joke among Saudi women.