Sisters Raghda, center-left, and Rafaa Abuazzah at the coffee shop where they work in Medina, Saudi Arabia. Photo / Imam Al-Dabbah, The New York Times
Sisters Raghda, center-left, and Rafaa Abuazzah at the coffee shop where they work in Medina, Saudi Arabia. Photo / Imam Al-Dabbah, The New York Times
On the question of women working, the law of the land was crystal clear. Raghda and Rafaa Abuazzah's parents had ruled otherwise.
"What will people say? You'll be in public!" their father said after the sisters scandalised their parents by announcing that they wanted jobs at a coffee shop inMedina, Saudi Arabia — the second-holiest city in Islam, where the Prophet Muhammad was said to have died. "It's fine to work in an office because no one can see you there. But how can you work with men?"
Women travel without guardians at the King Khald Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Photo / Imam Al-Dabbah, The New York Times
Two years and much ado later, Raghda Abuazzah serves lattes filigreed with milk art at a strip-mall coffee shop, and Rafaa Abuazzah hosts community gatherings at an event space across the way. Their co-workers and customers include men and women. Although their hair remains covered, their faces are bare. And their parents, to everyone's surprise, are coming around. Kind of.
"My parents are against me working here. But it's so good to finally be myself," said Raghda Abuazzah, 21. "Now I'm free. I can finally talk to people without covering my face."
For Westerners — squinting at Saudi Arabia across a vast landscape of stories about oppressed women, ultraconservative Islam and human rights abuses — the desert kingdom often leaves a single, damning impression: Here is a country that women are desperate to flee.
But the changes driven by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto ruler, have complicated that image over the last few years, codifying for women the right to drive, attend sporting events and travel without a man's permission, among others. As the social codes that long governed their lives relax their grip, more women are wearing their hair uncovered and mingling openly with men — at least in larger cities.
But whether reality lives up to the law depends on the dice roll of birth. Day by day, it still falls to women in many households to negotiate their freedoms with the fathers, husbands, brothers and sons who serve as their legal guardians.
Even before the legal changes, Saudi women from tolerant families rarely had to chafe under requirements that a male guardian approve plans to get jobs or travel abroad. For them, permission was nearly always granted.
Women participate in the class at the women's Saudi Driving School, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Photo / Imam Al-Dabbah, The New York Times
Although Crown Prince Mohammed has spoken of dismantling the guardianship system, women remain legal minors when it comes to marrying, living on their own and other matters. Those from more traditional families are still yoked to male guardians for whom fear of God, change or what the neighbours will think often outweighs the letter of the law.
For a long time, Raghda and Rafaa Abuazzah seemed fated to retrace the path of their five older sisters: arranged marriages while still young; children soon thereafter; faces covered with the niqab, the black veil that reveals only the eyes. The sisters who worked did so in the seclusion of offices, segregated from male co-workers.
The younger siblings were not looking forward to it.
"Me and Raghda were so depressed," said Rafaa Abuazzah, who is younger but more forceful. "We thought: We can't do anything. We don't have choices. This isn't the life we want to live."
Compared with girls they had seen in Jeddah, the Saudi port city where looser social customs allowed women to go unveiled, wear their all-covering robes open over jeans and mingle with men in public, the sisters felt anonymous, forgettable.
"We had no self-esteem," Raghda Abuazzah said, "because we all looked the same."
Triumphs that might seem trivial outside the kingdom loom huge within it, especially in the small cities and villages where most Saudis live, far from cosmopolitan Riyadh and Jeddah.
Female baristas were nonexistent in Medina when the sisters first got hired at a coffee shop whose owner had decided to brave it. Skittish about their uncovered faces and flustered about their friendly interactions with boys, he fired them soon after.
By then, however, other cafes had opened with both male and female staff. The sisters found new jobs — Raghda Abuazzah at Dasoqa, a coffee shop whose name means "ladybug," and Rafaa Abuazzah at Blink, a community gathering space nearby.
Their parents have caved a little but fretted a lot. They feared for the family's reputation as much as for their daughters' souls.
Workers help shoppers in a Riyadh store that sells colorful hijabs and clothes designed for women who want to travel or live outside Saudi Arabia. Photo / Imam Al-Dabbah, The New York Times
"Our dad says, 'What if my family came and saw you here working, making coffee and drinks?'" said Raghda Abuazzah. "'They'll see your face!'"
To the sisters, that was the point. Raghda Abuazzah's hair remains neatly tucked under a lilac head scarf, Rafaa Abuazzah's under a black one. But their faces — sometimes people still do a double-take when they see them — are bare.
"My face is my identity," said Rafaa Abuazzah.
It was not only their parents who objected. When they waited for Ubers after work, the young men hanging around the mall often heckled them, suspicious of their uncovered faces and light makeup.
"What are you doing with those guys?" they demanded as the sisters chatted with male friends.
The lack of reliable public polling and free speech makes it difficult to gauge how Saudis view women's changing status. But one study, from 2018, suggested that fear of social stigma may drive opposition more than personal resistance.
It found that a majority of Saudi husbands approve of their wives working outside the home, yet underestimate how many other men also support it. Telling them that more men actually favoured it was enough encouragement for them to register their wives for a job-recruitment service.
The problem is persuading individual legal guardians that attitudes are changing.
Not all the changes have been hard sells in Saudi Arabia.
Many Saudis, having traveled and lived abroad or seen the world through the internet, were already ready for a more permissive way of life. Others, like Rafaa and Raghda Abuazzah, were pushing for it from below.
"I think it's a huge wave that our parents can't stand in front of," Rafaa Abuazzah said. "Even if they wanted to, they can't."
