Manal al-Sharif

Manal al-Sharif grew up in Mecca and became one of the first women to work in information security at the state oil company Saudi Aramco, a career that took her abroad and showed her how differently women could live in other countries. In May 2011 she got behind the wheel of a car in the city of Khobar, where, as everywhere in Saudi Arabia, women were forbidden by custom and religious ruling from driving, and filmed herself doing it, posting the video online as part of a campaign called Women2Drive.

She was arrested the next day and held for nine days, an ordeal that made international headlines and turned her into the public face of the movement, though she always insisted the campaign belonged to many women, not to her alone. Released after signing a pledge not to drive again, she lost custody of her son in a divorce and later left Saudi Arabia, continuing to campaign from abroad and publishing a memoir, Daring to Drive, in 2017.

In September 2017 Saudi Arabia announced it would lift the driving ban, and the change took effect in June 2018, though several of the activists who had campaigned for it, including friends of al-Sharif, were arrested shortly before the ban ended and some remained in prison for years afterward, a reminder that the government wanted the reform credited to itself rather than to the women who had risked prison to win it.