I was looking at nytimes.com and this article caught my eye. Since we have been studying Persepolis
and have come across many instances of women’s rights (or lack thereof) I
thought this applied well. This article describes the way in which a few dozen
women in Saudi Arabia took a stand against the ban on women driving. Saudi
Arabia is the only country in which women are not permitted to drive. For a
long time many people have opposed this ban, and women are finally acting on this opposition by driving out in the open. In a country where women have such few
rights and punishments can be very severe, this takes incredible courage. They are not trying to start a revolution; these women just want to live normal lives, and being able to drive is a crucial part of that. My favorite line is the last sentence of
the article: one of the women says “I’m so proud of myself right now.” This
shows how meaningful basic rights are to women and how important it is for them to
stand up and fight for these rights.
It’s really interesting that rights which we would often take for granted are not even a possibility in other countries. It seems that in Saudi Arabia, many rights for women are dependent on her male counterpart, meaning that women can be granted certain rights only if she gets the consent of a male relative or her husband. This puts women in a very submissive role, much like the attitude that we can see in Vincent when he becomes Vera in The Skin I Live In. Even though these women have stated that they don’t want to start a revolution, just by showing that they want these basic human rights is a revolutionary idea for the country.
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