Soccer Dad

Using her head

Two months ago First Lady Laura Bush made waves when, in Saudi Arabia, she donned an abaya. She was subjected to a lot of criticism for being accepting of women's second class status in the Gulf kingdom. Kathleen Parker, who was there defended the First Lady in Successful Diplomacy from Laura Bush.

The scarf in question was a gift to Bush from a dozen Saudi women who shared their experiences fighting breast cancer with the first lady. The morning meeting was touching and intimate, the sort of bonding experience that opens hearts and minds in diplomatically useful ways.

Upon receiving the gift, Bush did what any decent, well-mannered person would do. She demonstrated her appreciation by placing the scarf on her head. In Saudi Arabia, it was a sweet, wordless gesture of friendship and mutual respect.

The advantage Kathleen Parker had was that she was there and didn't just see Mrs. Bush wearing a head covering, she saw the context in which it occurred.

Now Ms. Parker wonders if Laura Bush's diplomacy paid off in the King and the First Lady

The trip, while officially aimed at improving women's health (an acceptable and "safe" first-lady enterprise), was in fact a brilliant diplomatic maneuver in the arena of women's rights. Here's why:

In Saudi Arabia, where women's participation in society is severely limited -- no driving, no voting, no mixing with unrelated men -- it's not so easy to directly address women's rights. You can't just say to the king, "You know, Abdullah, you really should let women vote and drive and mingle with men anytime they want to."

He should, of course, but that's none of our concern, from the palace perspective. Moreover, external conversion doesn't work very well, we've noticed.

What one can do in Saudi Arabia is talk indirectly about less controversial issues such as women's health. Who isn't for good health? The Wahhabi branch of Islam that informs Saudi government and social policy may mean that women can't wear miniskirts in the public square, but clerics haven't yet said: Women deserve to die of breast cancer.

Even so, women's health has suffered as a byproduct of the very laws that restrict them in the broader society. Thus, health is a women's rights issue. A discussion about breast cancer in Saudi Arabia is a discussion about women's rights.

And it was the opening that the First Lady created regarding breast cancer that Parker thinks may have helped pushed King Abdullah to grant a reprieve to "Qatif girl."

Obviously Parker can't prove her assertion, it's still an interesting hypothesis.

Anne Applebaum examined why the world is so tolerant of Saudi gender based discrimination.

I think there is another explanation, too. As a nation, we are partial to issues that seem familiar, and the story of apartheid South Africa had echoes in American history, in our own civil-rights movement. It wasn't that big a leap for Jesse Jackson to support the anti-apartheid movement when it was at its peak in the 1980s, and it wasn't that hard for college students at that time, either: We had been taught about institutionalized racism in school.

By contrast, the women of contemporary Saudi Arabia need a much more fundamental revolution than the one that took place among American women in the 1960s, and it's one we have trouble understanding. Unlike American blacks, it has been a long time since American women grappled with issues as basic as the right to study or vote. Instead, we have (fortunately) fought for less fundamental rights in recent decades, and our women's groups have of late (unfortunately) had the luxury of focusing on the marginal. The National Council of Women's Organizations' most famous recent campaign was against the Augusta National Golf Club. The Web site of the National Organization for Women (I hate to keep picking on them, but it's so easy) has space for issues of "non-sexist car insurance" and "network neutrality" but not for the Saudi rape victim or the girl murdered last week in Canada for refusing to wear the hijab.

So the question is will approaching Saudi society by indirect means, such as the way Mrs. Bush did, effect a change? Change could come, but it would be gradual at best. Still it would appear that Mrs. Bush has already done more than many more vocal advocates for women's equality.

saudi arabia.