Modern Woman in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Rights, Challenges, and Achievements

Academic literature on Saudi women remains limited. Intense yet superficial journalistic scrutiny of their lives and persistent stereotypes anchor them in either victimhood or heroism. Most reporting presents Saudi women as victims of their own society, religion, and culture or exceptional women who have reached positions of leadership in business, government, science, literature, and media. The two sides often agree that the Saudi state is a force for emancipation. It pushes women to achieve high educational levels, appoints them to key government positions, and provides generous welfare programs to improve their lives. These persistent narratives indicate limited understanding of gender relations and their entanglements with political, religious, economic, and cultural factors in Saudi Arabia.Modern Woman in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, by Hend T. Al-Sudairy, does not escape these problematic assumptions about Saudi women and in fact reproduces them. Al-Sudairy’s book inserts a native voice that celebrates the past and present achievements of Saudi women thanks to government support. Al-Sudairy admits that there are challenges and obstacles to be overcome but asserts that Saudi women are modern and increasingly benefit from the great opportunities offered them by the government. Partly a reflection on the lives of women in the past, partly a sociological treatise on the lives of contemporary women, and partly a literary analysis of selected Saudi women’s novels, this short book confirms the accomplishments of heroic Saudi women under state guidance and encouragement.Al-Sudairy contends that “no one understands the Saudi woman better than a woman, plus I am a Saudi citizen and have lived my entire life in Saudi Arabia. . . . I am the product of my society’s culture, which makes it easier for me to explain this culture to others” (1–2). Such assertions ignore debates in multiple fields, including gender studies, about authorial identity, epistemology, the politics of voice, and methodologies of writing on any subject. Nativist knowledge has no intrinsic value and, like other types of knowledge, must be scrutinized and assessed according to academic criteria. To claim that only a woman understands women or that only an insider can grasp the complexity of the lives of Saudi women is distracting and problematic. Taken to its logical conclusion, such a sweeping statement undermines the contribution of a whole generation of outside observers and serious researchers who have written invaluable monographs about the other, whether men or women. Ironically, Al-Sudairy relies heavily on male travel writing and scholarship by outsiders who have illuminated aspects of Saudi culture, history, and contemporary life. She cannot be considered an authoritative voice simply because she is an insider woman.Modern Woman in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia does not rely on a specific methodology, nor does it clarify its theoretical contributions to gender studies. For instance, the modern in the title is not explained. Indeed, Al-Sudairy considers appointment to the Consultative Council (erroneously named a parliament) or enrollment in a school modern achievements or achievements of the modern. The reader gets the impression that being modern is simply a function of abandoning traditional roles. But have Saudi women—or any other women, for that matter—abandoned traditional roles? What are traditional roles? Don’t all women combine their jobs outside the home with their responsibilities in the home? Almost all educated upper-class Saudi women delegate household responsibilities to imported migrant women workers from the poor countries of Asia. Does oil wealth enable, restrict, or impact women’s emancipation in a country that still depends on oil for almost 90 percent of its income? Such matters are unaddressed in this book.A chapter focused on the nineteenth century incorporates the observations of male European travelers, anthropological studies, and Al-Sudairy’s observations. By looking at women’s dress, participation in production and trade, marriage patterns, and education historically, she paints a picture that confirms that Saudi women actively contributed to their own society. Al-Sudairy’s goal is to challenge stereotypes about women’s exclusion and marginalization in a bygone era. Two other chapters deal chronologically with selected novels written since the 1960s by Zainab Hufni, Omaimah Al-Khamis, and Layla Aljahni, among others. Al-Sudairy follows the production line, starting with early writings and ending with recently published novels, some of them controversial from a literary point of view. Some novels were negatively evaluated for their daring sexual and sensual allusions, while others were strong additions to a flourishing women’s literary scene. Al-Sudairy does not explain or analyze the explosion of women’s fictional writings—for example, by addressing limited freedom of expression and severe punishment for transgressors.The concluding chapter is a rather disappointing list of the achievements of exceptional Saudi women: the first Saudi woman appointed to a government post, the first Saudi woman to become vice chair of an archaeology department, the first woman rector (a princess) of the first women’s university, the first woman to discover cloning for embryos, and so on. Instead of offering a narrative analysis, Al-Sudairy enumerates exceptional women in politics, education, sports, and mass media. The chapter concludes by mentioning challenges and obstacles, all of which emanate from sociocultural barriers, namely, conservative Saudi society, families who bind women to “traditional roles,” and conservative religious scholars who persistently object to Westernization. Their current weapon is to create Twitter hashtags to tarnish the reputations of great emancipators of women, such as Turki al-Sudairi (a relative of the author) and the famous novelist Turki al-Hamad (124).This polemical book has many shortcomings. It can be read as a stark example of superficial propaganda designed to ameliorate the image of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by offering an unconvincing narrative about the emancipation of its women and the great new opportunities created by the state despite conservative families and bigoted religious scholars. Nevertheless, it is illuminating to read as a window into the current discourse that is often popular among a section of women academics and writers.