Claiming women’s rights [I don’t need support]

I’ve heard first about Ms. Wajiha Al-Huwaider through an email that presented her as women rights activist in KSA on a TV show, she wanted to revive the claim for women driving and demonstrated that by showing herself driving a car online… I highly respected her courage and determination, and heard more about her recent campaign to remove women guardianship system in KSA. This is a system that assigns a male guardian to every woman regardless of age to permit her to pursue everything in life, in other words, Saudi women can’t have a legal identity to be held accountable for any matter in their lives, they would need a guardian to approve their marriage, job, education, travel, or legal representation in any governmental office… This is an old system that has been legalized by the government which was meant to protect women when the tradition didn’t allow them to participate in public life by themselves for fear of harm in older societies where the laws were not held properly, but has been since an outdated system, and it turned to be a formality for most women and a nightmare for less fortunate ones… A Mahrem or a guardian has the legal power to stop women from anything and demand her to live as he wishes regardless of her consent, as the case in approving underage girls to marry older men, or children who would remain without ID papers because the father decided to abandon the woman and neglect the family, he can deny the link of any kid to him to avoid the alimony and no DNA testing would be of any use in here, in a male dominant society, a man of 18 years old can be the guardian of his sponsoring mom of 52 years if her husband dies…

Ms. Wajiha raised all these issues in a recent web article and decided to tackle this problem by a simple individual act, she would go every week to try to cross the border to Bahrain from the Saudi Eastern Province without a mahrem, this is meant to tell the authority that if they didn’t allow women to have the full accountability for their own lives and remove the guardianship system, they should then let the women leave the country to live in any other country that would respect them better and recognize them as fully accountable adults… what she needs from other women is to join her to the border to demand for the right to travel or to leave the country… In a reply to my email of support she said [I don't need support, I need women to come with me, do you know any women who would?]… I maybe thick a pit, but I don’t see the problem being solved by the authority allowing or preventing us from crossing the border, and I don’t believe that we need to confront the authority to get what we claim, the success in legalizing the marital age for young girls inspire us to try other meaningful, and less confrontational methods to reach the decision makers, without inciting negativity. Here is a possible list of actions with better long term effects:

• Prepare the public, raising the issue in media and newspapers and focusing on the detrimental effects of the guardianship system
• Forming women rights group “Non-Governmental” to educate women through lectures and pamphlets of the effects in the system and the tradition on their safety and wellbeing
• Inviting influential figures (like royalties) to join the effort to promote the cause
• Forming constituency and alliances with enough representative women to push the efforts and the message

I can see that the lady is asking others to join her in the demand for independence, but I can’t see why she is asking them to join her in her chosen action, how many women feel secure enough to challenge their families, traditions, government authority to join? How many can travel alone to the Eastern province? How risky would that be on their wellbeing? And would that grant them anything at all except focusing on their own individual freedom as what happened before with those women in the 90s who drove their cars? They were prevented from travel, banned from their jobs and never granted their request… My only take on Ms. Wajiha is her individual approach to solutions, this is a public issue and she needs all the support that she can get, to say that she doesn’t need support and that she only need to cross the borders to make the point is a major simplification of the National problem, she appeared driving her own car alone, and she appeared on the border alone also, and I do assume that not enough women would join because the majority are just like me, we want solution and not evacuation from the country or imprisonment for us and our Mahrams in the worst scenario…