Why did Saudi Arabia not allow women to drive?

Question

According to this article Saudi Arabia was (and still is for a little while) the only country that did not allow women to drive:

Women in Saudi Arabia will be allowed to drive, the government announced on Tuesday - ending their reign as the only nation in the world where women were forbidden from getting behind the wheel of a car.

Limiting economic opportunities happens in many countries which include Jordan, Iran, Afghanistan and Yemen:

About 155 countries have at least one law that limits women’s economic opportunities, while 100 states put restrictions on the types of jobs women can do and 18 allow husbands to dictate whether their wives can work at all.

Question: Why is Saudi Arabia the only country that had the restriction for driving?

Answer 1

Internal reasoning in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA): It's for women's benefit

Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Lohaidan, a judicial adviser to an association of Gulf psychologists, recently told a Saudi website that "If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards. That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees.”
(quoted from "'Negative Physiological Impacts'? Why Saudi Women Aren't Allowed to Drive"@The Atlantic)

It also helps enforce the country's ban on women interacting with men who aren't part of their family:

Driving is a direct extension of this type of religion-based segregation. As one Saudi man explained to a Christian Science Monitor reporter, “What would happen if a woman got in a car accident? Then she would be forced to deal with the male driver of the other car, a stranger, with no oversight."

Underlying reason 1: Wahhabism and gender separation

KSA's social norms AND laws are based on Wahhabism.

Part of those tenets are:

1. a requirement that women's place is at home, taking care of home and raising children (not a uniquely Saudi or Wahhabbi idea, it was to one or another extent present in nearly 100% of pre-20th-century societies, from ancient Greeks to 19th century German Empire's "Kinder, Küche, Kirche"). But that has more weight and severity in Wahhabi branch of Islam as well as in middle-Eastern culture (separately from religion - most discussions of Middle East fail to appreciate the tribal cultural norms as separate but intertwined things from religion).

2. Religious based "modesty" requirement, which in Wahhabism takes the extreme form of a woman not being allowed to interact in any way shape or form with a non-close-relative male without a male guardian who is a relative.

Obviously, driving would present a challenge or a violation to both of the above norms.

Underlying reason 2: Oil

A less explored reason has to do with KSA's oil-based economy.

Michael L. Ross's work "Oil, Islam, And Women" in American Political Science Review (2008): 107--123:

he argued that there is an inverse relationship between oil and women’s social and political opportunities. The Middle East’s dire record in women’s rights and equality, he argued, was not due to the legacy of Islamic culture, but is rather attributable to oil. He concluded that the idea that “development leads to equality” was not valid in all cases, but depended on the type of development. Development that was dependent on oil and mineral revenues allowed for the preservation of patriarchal norms, laws and institutions in a society.
His study showed that similar impacts of oil on the status of women in oil-rich countries applied outside the Middle East in places like Nigeria, Russia and Chile. Ross’s research includes statistical data that show the existing relationship between oil and the impact on the work patterns of women and their opportunities for political representation.
The data show that the emergence of the Saudi oil industry directly yielded a drop in the proportion of women in the labor force and decision-making authority, an apparent characteristic of Gulf societies.
(Ross's work as explained in "Women in Saudi Arabia Status, Rights, and Limitations" candidacy dissertation from UoW)

Answer 2

It's much more complex than oil or patriarchy. What we call "patriarchy" is just a form of power that privileges men and allows them more freedoms and rights than women. Rome, Greece, Japan, India, the USA, Canada and Europe all before WW2 (and the need for women to "man" industrial machines for wartime production which was a major catalyst for women to continue the push for gender parity) etc. are all versions of patriarchal societies.

Not all societies (not even close to 1% let alone 100% historically) practiced patriarchy. Not even northern European societies (which for a period of time were just as oppressively patriarchal as Saudi Arabia) prior to Roman colonization; they tended to be much more egalitarian with much less sanctions against women expanding their interests outside of the so-called "domestic sphere".

Roman men were notoriously patriarchal for a mix of pseudo-scientific, religious and political reasons. Aristotle wrote that women were inferior men, that because they did not get enough heat during gestation they were failed males. He was basing this on observations of certain lizard and serpent species which determine sex based on in vitro temperature.

Men were considered the ideal human specimen and everything about Roman culture reflected this belief.

If we compare Saudi Arabia's history of patriarchy to that of the west, it would not be very different, really, until a certain point in history. The west and SA have many of the same external characteristics: religion, hierarchy, warlike tendencies, rigid social boundaries (e.g. European class system) .

The west diverged sometime after the middle ages in a very different trajectory. The result of this trajectory is the development of the notion of human rights for everyone regardless of sex in the western context. SA hasn't had that similar kind of development. Why?

Region, industrial and scientific revolutions, the western move toward secularization and the separation of church and state, a crucial development which the US is the only nation in recorded history to have codified.

We can see well-defined historical catalysts in US (and European, excepting the eastern European states) history: Magna Carta, treaty of Versailles, Cromwell's revolution, the American revolution, abolition, suffragism, etc. All social phenoms that have NEVER happened in Saudi history.

Essentially, all of these factors (Hegel's proposition) allowed for a loosening of the hierarchical and rigid social boundaries. personal lived experiences of male soldiers in the field in WW1 being saved by women nurses/medics, the allies war machine being driven by women workers, the leveling of the social field through the various legal statements made in the USA about equality etc. the loosening of the class caste system.

Again, SA has never had that, it is essentially stuck in a primitive power mode that organizes itself around male dominance and oppressive masculinity because it has never had the lived experience of seeing women live up to their potential through social conflict. It's like the needle is stuck in a scratched groove.

I'm a man, and I do not personally understand what it is some guys get from dominating women. It's not a very fair fight to begin with (I'm 6'5", 280) so it's not really something to take pride in.....the only thing that makes sense is that in patriarchal societies sons are really important.

Lineage and male ego around producing male heirs (again Greek and Roman societies also had this and its influence is still felt in western cultures) is a super big deal. Cuckolding is an equally big deal, what man in such a context could handle

1. being cheated on by his wife,
2. be insecure about whether or not his son was actually his?

I imagine #2 would be crucial to men in SA society. How else can you control a woman if you can't control her heart? You have to control her body and limit her choices, so that your insecurity is quelled. Because of this, I see SA men as very weak, very insecure and immature and their own traditions perpetuate that insecurity and weakness.

Also, I think it is of interesting note that prior to Islam many Arab cultures had the common practice of sodomy on boys and adolescent males just as Greeks and Romans did. Penis in anus = ultimate form of male dominating another male.