David Silverman/Getty Images

For the first time ever, a female Muslim Arab soldier has joined an elite Israeli Air Force unit. Upon completing a medic training course with top honors, she became part of the Airborne Combat Search and Rescue Unit 669, a premier unit that extricates wounded soldiers from combat zones in sensitive and highly classified operations.

Unlike Jewish young adults, most Arab Israelis are not required to serve in the military, but this soldier, from an Arab village in northern Israel, volunteered to serve. But Muslims and Arabs are prevented from serving in the elite Unit 669, which requires an extremely high security clearance, due to fears about conflicting loyalties should they have to serve in Palestinian areas or fight Muslim countries. So how did she get in? An investigation revealed that an error was made, although news reports have not described the nature of the error or who made it. (My hunch is that those details are confidential.)

Nonetheless, the unit's commander has been so impressed with the woman's exceptional ability that he is allowing her to stay. Although some on the Internet say she may end up betraying her unit, it may be that in this case an error ended up yielding the correct outcome -- letting in a talented, loyal soldier.

www.miss-landmine.org

Dignity, a restored sense of beauty, and the spotlight on a serious issue: The goals for Angola's Miss Landmine pageant brought together 18 contestants, all land mine survivors, representing the southwest African nation's provinces. On a television special Wednesday night, the ladies posed in gowns and swimsuits -- and their artificial limbs.  The winner, Augusta Urica, was presented $2,500 USD by Angola's First Lady Ana Paola dos Santos, and will receive a customized artificial limb. You can see some of the contestants' profiles at the event's Web site. (Pictured above is Cuanza Sul, one of the runners-up.)

Each year, between three and four-hundred people are maimed by mines in Angola -- remnants of a 27-year civil war that ended six years ago. Even though significant effort has been put forward to get rid of them, the country remains one of the most mine-laden in Africa.  

There are 80,000 amputees in Angola, most as a result of landmines, according to the International Herald Tribune. Candida Celeste, Angola's minister of family, said, "They showed that they can, that they are able... This will provide encouragement to all those left invalid by the war."

The pageant came ahead of International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action which falls on April 4 each year.  As the tens of thousands of Angolans can attest, mines are not weapons that can be easily and completely undeployed, and they continue taking lives and livelihoods for generations after hostilities cease. Though, as these women prove, there can be life after landmines as well.

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

It looks like White House spokesperson Dana Perino has come down with a case of the Charlotte Allens. I just sighed a sad sigh last year when Dana all but bragged about not knowing what the Cuban Missile Crisis was ("It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure..."). But now she's telling people that she just doesn't get missiles and defense because she's a girl:

Some of the terms I just don't know, I haven’t grown up knowing. The type of missiles that are out there: patriots and scuds and cruise missiles and tomahawk missiles. And I think that men just by osmosis understand all of these things, and they're things that I really have to work at — to know the difference between a carrier and a destroyer, and what it means when one of those is being launched to a certain area. [my emphasis]

Dana, please stop. Seriously.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

This morning, I attended the 2nd Annual International Woman of Courage Awards, presented by Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky in honor of Saturday's International Women's Day. Out of the 95 women worldwide who received the honor, eight were invited to personally accept the award at the ceremony.

The awardees are an inspiring group of women, including: Suraya Pakzad from Afghanistan, whose organization Voice of Women sheltered and counseled women even throughout a repressive Taliban regime; Virisilia Buadromo of Fiji, who heads up the Fiji Women's Rights Movement (FWRM), and pushes for family law reform, Eaman Al-Gobory from Iraq, a physician with the International Organization of Migration (IOM) who has worked tirelessly to find specialized medical care for Iraqis whose afflictions cannot be treated within Iraq; and Binal Thawabteh a Palestinian women's rights activist who has encouraged and trained women to seek public office, and recently founded a monthly newspaper that raises such hot-button issues as polygamy and honor killings. Other awardees hailed from newly independent Kosovo, Pakistan, Paraguay, and Somalia.

The rise of NGOs such as The Initiative for Inclusive Security reflects growing awareness that women's full participation in society isn't just about justice and fairness, it's also about security. Choosing to honor these particular eight women -- all from areas ravaged by conflict and instability -- clearly shows that this is also the line Rice means to take as she seeks to polish her legacy.

As Tyler Cowen might say, there's a market for everything. Meet China's "womb brokers":

Liu Jin Feng, 30, was a manager for a joint venture company in his native Zhejiang province with a newly pregnant wife when the concept of womb-broking occurred to him.

He spent six months investigating. Four hundred babies later, he is confident he has picked a sustainable industry. Couples need to budget for at least 300,000 yuan ($A50,000). About 40,000 yuan is for the surrogate, a fee for the agent, and the rest covers extensive medical, travel and living costs.

Of course, China is far behind India, where commercial surrogacy was made legal in 2002 (it's illegal but tolerated in China). And if you turn to the classified section of any elite U.S. university, it's easy to find advertisements from infertile couples looking for an egg donor with an Ivy League pedigree. In fact, California has some of the most liberal surrogacy laws in the world, and parts of Europe have become links in a globalizing commercial surrogacy industry. If anything, the Chinese are just playing catch-up -- though I imagine further digging would show that the phenomenon is not quite as new as the above article would have us believe.

(Hat tip: China Digital Times)

Since the beginning of the year, John McCain seems to have settled on a consistent set of closing remarks for his most important speeches. Whenever he talks about America, he refers to his favorite nation with the feminine pronoun, "her." But in three out of the last four primary and caucus victory speeches he's delivered, McCain has stepped up his invocation of Lady Liberty. Here are the last few lines of McCain's New Hampshire victory speech:

So, my friends, we celebrate one victory tonight and leave for Michigan tomorrow to win another. But let us remember that our purpose is not ours alone; our success is not an end in itself. America is our cause -- yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Her greatness is our hope; her strength is our protection; her ideals our greatest treasure; her prosperity the promise we keep to our children; her goodness the hope of mankind. That is the cause of our campaign and the platform of my party, and I will stay true to it so help me God.

This is hardly the first time anyone invoked America in the same way they might refer to a great ship, and it isn't even the first time for McCain. But the use of the word "her" seems to have taken on a greater frequency and urgency in his oratory since January. I tend to think that this subtle change in McCain’s language is calculated to establish two things.

First, using "her" shows McCain as a traditionalist. He talks about great causes the way a founding father might have spoken. And second, McCain establishes himself as a paternal figure: a man who has the power to protect, honor and provide for a woman -- when that woman just happens to be the USA. It's a subtle way to imply that a woman would not be able to do the same job as president as a man. Certainly, it would sound strange for Hillary Clinton to refer to America as "her." In this way, McCain can covertly raise the gender issue without ever sounding overtly sexist.

www.belikeothers.com

Last fall, Passport noted that more sex-change surgeries are performed in Iran than in any other country except Thailand. Ayatollah Khomeini approved them for "diagnosed transsexuals" 25 years ago, and today the Iranian government will pay up to half the cost for those in financial need. Former FP researcher David Francis wrote, "In a country that shuns homosexuality, this makes perverse sense, as after a sex-change operation, one technically isn't attracted to one's own sex and therefore isn't gay."

Now, Iranian-born, American-raised, director Tanaz Eshaghian has made a provocative documentary, Be Like Others, about young Iranian men who undergo sex-change surgery. It premiered earlier this year at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals. Check out some clips here, including one of a 20-year-old man who laughingly remarks, "It's so difficult," in reference to wearing a head scarf outside.

USAToday's "OnDeadline" blog finds some choice morsels from newly released transcripts of Henry Kissinger's 1973 meeting with Mao:

You know, China is a very poor country," Mao is quoted as saying during the exchange. "We don't have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands."

The Chinese leader drew laughter when he returned to the proposition a few minutes later. "Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you 10 million." he said, adding: "We have too many women ... They give birth to children and our children are too many."

It's not clear whether Mao is at all serious -- he was a pretty crazy dude, after all -- but Kissinger's response is precious:

It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it.

AFP/Getty Images

We always love a good, old-fashioned international sex scandal here at Passport, be it in Tehran, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, or Hong Kong.

Now, it's Greece's turn, and it may be the most fascinating one yet. Here's the story: A young woman slept with the general secretary of the culture ministry in the hopes of obtaining a permanent job (judging by his photo, left, that had to be the only reason). When he didn't follow through, she recorded her encounters with him on a DVD, allegedly to blackmail him, and ended up taking it to the press. Most journalists wouldn't work with her, but a copy of the DVD somehow found its way to the prime minister's office. Once the official being blackmailed got wind of this, he resigned and jumped from his balcony in a suicide attempt. He's now in the hospital recovering, but the scandal has penetrated Greek society deeper than anyone anticipated.

The Greek government tried to spin this as "a sex scandal blown out of proportion," but the public just isn't buying it. The tape submitted to prosecutors as evidence was found to have been edited, raising suspicions the government is hiding something, possibly revelations about graft and corruption. The culture ministry official, whose finances and other possibly shady deals are now under investigation, had controlled significant amounts of EU and Greek funds and had close ties to Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis.

The scandal has sent the government's approval rating below 30 percent, the worst level since it came to power in 2004 -- ironically, on an anti-corruption platform. With the ministry official's resignation, the ruling party is down to 151 seats out of 300, a bare majority.

While corruption has been a huge topic of discussion, others see an opportunity to shed light on Greece's treatment of women. A woman formerly in construction management put the country's problem this way to Reuters:

You study, you work hard and still you have to let someone grab your butt to rise."

HENGHAMEH FAHIMI/AFP/Getty Images

A couple years ago, FP published an article about an Iranian magazine called Zanan ("Women," in Farsi). Written by Haleh Esfandiari of the Wilson Center, who was imprisoned in Tehran for several months last year, "Iranian Women, Please Stand Up" told the tale of Shahla Sherkat, who bravely courted controversy as the founder of a glossy women's magazine that covered topics both political and personal. Esfandiari wrote:

Zanan has run articles on the latest theories of feminism in the West, the unjust treatment of women in Islamic societies, and the significance for Iranians of international conventions on human rights and the rights of women and children. ... Not all articles in Zanan incite such strong reactions. The glossy has [also] published stories about Iran's first woman pilot, its first female cab driver, and the country’s first woman racing car ace.

Despite harassment from government officials, periodic censorship, and budget woes, Sherkat managed to keep the magazine open for 16 years. But last week the government shut down Zanan, this time for good. Iranian authorities, according to an editorial in the New York Times, claim "the magazine was a 'threat to the psychological security of the society' because it showed Iranian women in a 'black light.'"

A "black light"? Give me a break! Zanan was one of the very few media outlets in Iran dedicated to women's issues, and one of the only places where women could actually be heard. Because of numerous run-ins with the government in the past (past contributors to Zanan had been jailed at various times for their writing) Sherkat was always very careful to toe the line with the magazine's editorial content. The shuttering of the magazine is an outrage, it's a tragedy, and most of all, it's a crime against Iranian women. Tehran should realize that by closing down Zanan, it's only displaying its own weakness and fear.

If you're a man in the Banda district of India who beats your wife, demands more dowry, or otherwise mistreats women, you'd better watch out. A posse of vigilante women clad in pink saris may soon come after you, and it's going to be ugly.

The "Gulabi Gang" (Pink Gang) uses sticks (lathis) and cricket bats to "teach erring men a lesson." In one instance, they chased a woman's abusive, alcoholic husband into a sugarcane field and sorely thrashed him. They also go after corrupt government officials. Last year, they stormed a police station after cops refused to register the case of a low-caste man simply because of his social standing.

This area of India, in the state of Uttar Pradesh (the same state from which the late "bandit queen" Phoolan Devi hailed), is notorious for its ill-treatment of women and people of lower castes. Only 24 percent of women can read (compared with 50 percent of men), domestic violence is rampant, and there are just 846 females per 1,000 males (compared with the state's average of 879). Bonded labor (a.k.a. slavery) is common, lower-caste children face open discrimination at school, and government officials are corrupt.

Given these circumstances, a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. Gulabi Gang founder Sampat Pal Devi, who was married off at age 9 and had her first child at 13, says:

Nobody comes to our help in these parts. The officials and police are corrupt and anti-poor. So sometimes we have to take the law into our own hands. At other times, we prefer to shame the wrongdoers. But we're not a gang in the usual sense of the term. We're a gang for justice.

Until the rule of law can be established, it looks like justice will be have to administered via grrrl power.

And here I was thinking that "courting the Cuban-American vote" was just a metaphor. Mitt Romney appears to have taken the phrase rather literally:

On Sunday, in Sweetwater, the Mormon candidate who has been married to the same woman for almost forty years found himself trying to explain the appeal of Florida's sun-soaked fairer sex. "Why are there so many beautiful women here? I haven't figured this out," Romney said, innocently enough. "Cuban American women are gorgeous."

The Telegraph reports that later this year, Saudi Arabia plans to lift its longstanding prohibition on female drivers. It's anyone's guess if this is really going to happen, but the Saudi regime's reason for making the move is revealing:

The move is designed to forestall campaigns for greater freedom by women, which have recently included protesters driving cars through the Islamic state in defiance of a threat of detention and loss of livelihoods. [...]

Saudi women have mounted growing protests. Fouzia al-Ayouni, the country's most prominent women's rights campaigner, has risked arrest by leading convoys of women drivers. "We have broken the barrier of fear," she said. "We want the authorities to know that we're here, that we want to drive, and that many people feel the way we do."

Can't have that kind of uppity behavior! It'll be interesting to see how conservatives in Saudi Arabia react to this trial balloon. Last year, the kingdom's al-Watan newspaper published a letter that said, "Allowing women to drive will only bring sin... The evils it would bring - mixing between the genders, temptations, and tarnishing the reputation of devout Muslim women - outweigh the benefits."

It may be some time before the sin hits the road, though. Even if a royal decree does reverse the ban, there will be plenty of opportunities for conservatives to mount a rear-guard campaign. "Practical hurdles stopping women obtaining licences and insurance must be overcome," the Telegraph notes.

Iran may be an international pariah, but the country is nonetheless eagerly suiting up for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this year's biggest international event. In the Athens Games of 2004, the Islamic Republic allowed just one woman to compete and won only six medals. This year, nationalistic Iran is investing greater resources in its team and hoping for a stronger performance.

An unlikely boost for Iran's "Go for the Gold in '08" strategy has come from the conservative religious establishment: a "special religious dispensation" that allows more women to compete, as long as they wear the proper attire. Check out Haaretz's translation of an al-Jazeera report here:

Couple this with news that Hamas is recruiting women police officers to serve in Gaza, and you have to wonder what's going on in the region.

Toby Jones, an assistant history professor at Rutgers and a former analyst with the International Crisis Group, writes in with a thoughtful rebuttal to yesterday's post about Saudi Arabia: 

While I applaud the spirit of your critique of Anne Applebaum's take on gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia, I'm afraid your rejoinder is wide of the mark. Applebaum is right to criticize the ruling class, but wrong to say that the fate of women there isn't dictated by religion at all. Part of the challenge is to figure out what is religious about gender in Saudi Arabia and why religion gets invoked to justify women's subordinate status. Rather than seeing the issue as one of doctrine, or as the product of the peninsula's tribal past as you suggest, it would be more helpful to see it as political. More specifically, the kingdom's treatment of women has everything to do with the issue of the political, juridical, and legal structures of authority that flow from the basic contract between rulers and the clergy. Women have been thrown under the bus by the kingdom's rulers to the religious scholars who see control over women and women's bodies as one of the last bastions of their spiritual and social power. Islam does not dictate such treatment of women. We know, however, that the tenets of faith become fuzzy when authority and power are at stake.

On the issue of Saudi liberalism, you've parroted the Saudi state about the fault lines that exist in the kingdom and why we (the United States) should support the political status quo there: It is a place where a liberal leadership routinely squares off against a regressive, tribal, and dangerously conservative (religious) populace. The suggestion that the Saudis know what pace of reform the "traffic will bear" is hard to take seriously. Authoritarian states regularly claim to be "reforming," a process that typically leads to a stronger authoritarianism in the end. Saudi Arabia is no exception. Ask any Saudi reformer, including Abdullah al-Hamid who is in jail for promoting reform while Islamic militants are rehabbed and freed from prison, if the state just needs more time and that it will get there.

While there are plenty of Saudis who would be familiar to American liberals as a result of their having studied here, it is more important to recognize that there are also plenty of Saudis educated in their own system that express values and political goals that we should embrace and pursue more seriously. On the matter of gender apartheid, it is also time to take seriously the voices of Saudi women who have their own thoughts to offer about how to improve their fate. They are not hard to find.

Anne Applebaum rightly condemns Saudi Arabia's treatment of women, but I think she misunderstands the political dynamics in the kingdom. Writing about a truly abhorrent case in which a Saudi court ruled that a woman who had been brutally gang raped had to face  a punishment of 200 lashes and six months in prison, Applebaum opines:

Thanks to international pressure, the Saudi king has pardoned the woman. And now? In Saudi Arabia women still can't vote, can't drive, can't leave the house without a male relative. No campaign of the kind once directed at South Africa has ever been mounted in their defense.

The comparison of Saudi and South African apartheid, and the different Western attitudes to both, has been made before. Recently the journalist Mona Eltahawy argued that while oil is a factor, the real reason Saudi teams aren't kicked out of the Olympics is that the "Saudis have succeeded in pulling a fast one on the world by claiming their religion is the reason they treat women so badly." Islam, she points out, does take other forms in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and elsewhere. But Saudi propaganda, plus our own timidity about foreign customs, has blinded us to the fact that the systematic, wholesale Saudi oppression of women isn't dictated by religion at all but rather by the culture of the Saudi ruling class.

If you meet Saudi officials, you soon realize that many of them are actually Western-educated liberals. The oil minister, for instance, went to Lehigh and Stanford. The ambassador to the United States attended Texas and Georgetown. Before 9/11, more than 60,000 Saudis came to the United States each year. That number is now down to around 25,000. Still, in 2006, more than 11,000 visas were issued to incoming Saudi students. Think most of those kids don't absorb American culture and values while they're in college? Many of them go back and become high-ranking officials in Saudi Aramco or the government. They will tell you that widespread, systematic discrimination against women in their country is a tribal issue and has nothing to due with Islam. 

Some top leaders, such as Interior Minister Prince Naif bin AbdulAziz, are basically religious fundamentalists. But in general, the "Saudi ruling class" is a relatively liberal group sitting on top of a deeply conservative population. It's an elite that constantly jockeys with the religious establishment for power; sometimes the liberals win, and sometimes they lose. Certainly, Saudi Arabia's reformers move more cautiously than we in the West might like. But they know far better than we do what the traffic will bear. Remember: Before oil was discovered in 1938, Saudi Arabia was largely a land of tribal nomads and subsistence farmers. Just 70 years later, the country is a modernizing state and one of the linchpins of the global economy. This is a lot for any country to absorb. Give the Saudis time. They'll get there.

STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP/Getty Images

[Please read editor's note at the end.] 

Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, who's currently visiting France, has erected a heated, Bedouin-style tent in which to receive visitors due to his claustrophobia. And it's not just government officials he seeks to meet. On his way to France he said:

I want my tent to be erected near Elysee Palace. I want to meet 200 attractive French women there.

His tent has ended up in the garden of Baron Gustave de Rothschild's former mansion. No word on whether any beauties have showed up.

[NOTE: An astute Passport reader alerted us that the aforementioned quote attributed to Qaddafi may actually come from the French satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné because an International Herald Tribune article attributes a similar statement to Le Canard Enchaîné. The Turkish newspaper Sabah, upon which this blog post was based, attributes the quote to a news program on France's Canal Plus TV channel. Passport attempted to contact Le Canard Enchaîné to verify the veracity of the quote, but the newspaper has not responded to us.]

[NOTE 2 (Dec. 18, 2007): Qaddafi is reported to travel with a posse of 200 female bodyguards called the Amazonian Guard, a few of whose members can be seen in this photo. Thus, Qaddafi may have been requesting 200 bodyguards, not beauties.]

AFP/Getty Images

In India, what was supposed to be a promising "e-government" service has been withdrawn after it became misused as a tool for harassing young women.

Last year, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh started out with an innovative service that was supposed to promote transparency: People could use their mobile phones to text-message a car's license-plate number, and would then receive a message with information about the vehicle, including its date of purchase, the taxes and fees paid on it, and the name, address, and phone number of the owner. The details could assist someone buying a used car or a police officer who quickly needed information about a vehicle involved in an accident, theft, or other crime. (Sounds like it could've also been used to track down someone who cut you off in traffic.)

Instead, it became a way for men to get the contact info of young women drivers and then harass them. The state's Transport Department received a number of complaints from women who were being harassed. Those complaints—along with the fact that the volume of messages sent to the department had jumped "several fold"—caused the texting service to be withdrawn.

The whole story raises questions about how much information should be made publicly available in this day and age. Records of people's births, divorces, house sales, crimes, and, in some cases, even incomes have been publicly available in many places for a long time. But accessing those records usually required a trip to city hall, filling out forms, and paying photocopying and postage fees. Now, in more places around the world, we can access the juicy details of people's lives—such as whether their houses are in foreclosure—all while wearing our pajamas in front of our home computers.

INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP/Getty Images

A new study of the effects of gender stereotypes around the world suggests that women in the developing world find it easier to advance professionally than their counterparts in wealthy countries. The survey was prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the 2007 Women's Forum for the Economy and Society in Deauville, France. Samuel DiPiazza, global head of PwC, summed up the report's findings:

In some countries such as Germany and Switzerland, there are cultural and social perceptions of women that make advancement much more challenging. Whereas in the developing world, where there is a huge cry for talent, where there is enormous growth, you must be able to adjust to these norms faster."

Elisabeth Kelan of the London Business School agreed with the report's characterization of her home country, Germany:

In Germany, we have the concept of the raven mother, which suggests they abandon their child if they go to work." As a result, less than 16% of German women with children below six work full-time.

Germany's first female chancellor, Angela Merkel, has no children, as another participant at the forum pointed out. This environment contrasts greatly with India's high-tech sector, for instance, in which stereotypes are not as entrenched, the demand for talent is great, and women are having a much easier time advancing into higher ranks. Another finding that seems likely to generate controversy is the report's assertion that China's one-child policy has helped women because girls do not have to compete with their brothers for education and parental recognition. The policy is often criticized by women's rights advocates for inducing parents to abandon, abort, or give baby girls up for adoption. 

The report would seem to contradict the modernization theory of development, which holds that developing countries emulate the social norms of more economically advanced countries as they modernize. In this aspect, the new arrivals seem to be leap-frogging the established powers. 

A study recently featured in FP showed that rural Indian women who watched satellite TV came to have more liberal attitudes and behaviors. For example, they became less accepting of spousal abuse, their bias in favor of having boys declined, school enrollment among girls increased, and the women were more likely to be able to spend money without a husband's permission.

Now, a similar "TV effect" could be occurring in Saudi Arabia, the only country where women aren't allowed to drive cars. Women's right to drive has now become a growing topic of debate, and Saudi women are saying that this debate stems in part from what women see on satellite TV and read on the Internet.

Not only do they learn about the freedom that women abroad have, but they see depictions of Saudi women themselves living lives of freedom. The country's most popular show, Tash Ma Tash (No Big Deal), a comedy that airs during Ramadan, addresses controversial social issues and shows episodes with Saudi women driving and going to the movies (there are presently no cinemas in Saudi Arabia). Another popular show, Amsha Bint Amash (Amsha, Daughter of Amash), is about a Saudi woman who disguises herself as a man to drive a cab.

On Sept. 23, Saudi Arabia's national day, the League of Demanders of Women's Right to Drive Cars in Saudi Arabia delivered to the king a petition signed by 1,100 women demanding the right to drive cars. The king hasn't yet replied, though.

And the women shouldn't expect an affirmative reply anytime soon. Advocates for women's rights concede that much preparation and public education would be required to ready both women and men for this relatively profound social change. Similarly, the producer of Tash Ma Tash says regarding women driving, "There will be a time [when] we will accept it, so now is the time to get prepared for that."

Too much social change too quickly in any society can backfire and produce a backlash and other destabilizing effects; Saudis must be slowly eased into this new world of liberated women. When it comes to women's rights in Saudi Arabia, slow and steady wins the race.