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In a deeply conservative culture, they are carefully redefining the boundaries of public life.

This story appears in the February 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Inside her family’s sitting room, where she had plumped onto a sofa to pour us Arabic coffee, Noof Hassan was testing out the word “headhunted.” She had never learned this in her English classes at school, and when she heard me say it, she made me repeat it because she liked it so much. “Yes!” she said. “I was headhunted. I’d had many offers before. But this time even my boss said, ‘We don’t want you to go—but this is a good offer.’ ”

Noof is 32 and has thick brown hair, caramel skin, and merry, almond-shaped eyes. The apartment she shares with her husband, Sami, and their two small sons takes up one floor of a three-story building in a crowded neighborhood of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Two years ago, the first time I met her, she was a manager in a food-processing factory, overseeing a dozen workers in an experimental all-female wing that was part of a nationwide campaign to draw Saudi women into paying jobs. Now, in the lighting assembly plant that had just poached her away, Noof was in charge of ten times that many. Her salary had shot up too.

“They have given me a nickname there,” she said. The women Noof supervises work in an area off-limits to men, but this company’s managerial offices are “mixed,” as the Saudis say: men and women, unrelated by blood or marriage, in close proximity every day. Addressing each other with more than formal courtesies. Attending meetings at the same conference table. Maybe poring side by side over the same document. Saudi Arabia is the most profoundly gender-segregated nation on Earth, and amid the fraught, fragile, extraordinary changes under way in the daily lives of the kingdom’s women—multiple generations, pushed by new labor policies and the encouragements of the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, are now debating what it means to be both truly modern and truly Saudi—this matter of mixing remains very controversial indeed. There are women here who won’t even consider a job that requires it.

There are women who might consider such a job but are overruled by their parents, or their husbands, or worried relatives saying, no, not you; other Muslim countries may permit such a thing, but in Saudi Arabia this is not what decent women do. There are women at the opposite end of the spectrum too, quite at ease with male colleagues—in the past decade, government scholarship programs have sent tens of thousands of Saudi women to study abroad, and they’re coming home, many impatient to push the pace of change.

Somewhere along that complicated spectrum, improvising to suit her own ideas about dignity, Noof has established her personal requirements inside the company offices: no physical contact with men, please, no matter how incidental. “The lady who is training me understands,” Noof said. “I told her, ‘This is not because I have a baby and am worried about germs. This is religion. I can’t touch a man who is not my father, my uncle, my brother. That’s why.’”

Thus the nickname. “Mrs. Noof Not Shaking Hands,” Noof said, and laughed so hard that she almost fell over on the sofa. Noof’s laugh, which is rich, is one of the reasons we became friends. She’s quick-witted and tough. She makes fun of people who are officious or rude. One of her cell phones rings to music from Grey’s Anatomy. In her 20s she rejected alternative suitors preferred by her family because she was determined to marry Sami, whom she loved. She estimates that she saw Titanic at least ten times when she was a teenager; movie theaters are prohibited in Saudi Arabia, but popular DVDs are easy to come by, no matter what disapproving conservative sheikhs may say. (When I recalled that Titanic includes an enthusiastic sex scene featuring the not-yet-married heroine, Noof was unruffled. “Yeah, it’s OK,” she said. “It’s her culture.”)

I tell you these things here because Sami was about to drive us to the mall so Noof could help me pick out a new abaya, the ankle-length covering garment women must wear in Saudi Arabia, and I want you to see her before she goes to the bedroom closet for one of her own, all of which are black. Abayas in colors are starting to proliferate in Jeddah, the less conservative port city in the west, but in Riyadh a nonblack abaya worn in public still invites scowls from strangers and possible rebuke by the street-patrolling religious police. The abaya Noof pulled out had gray plaid trim, with a flashy hint of red in the plaid—Noof had bought it in Jeddah. And pockets, very convenient, a cell phone pocket sewn onto the left sleeve. Noof shrugged the abaya over her skirt and blouse, the way one might don a raincoat. She snapped it down the middle, recasting her outer shape as an elongated black triangle. She wrapped her black tarha, the long Arabian head scarf, over her hair and under her chin and once more over her head.

“Where’s my purse?” Noof asked. Sami brought it to her. Then, just before crossing the threshold of their apartment building’s front gate, Noof draped the remaining length of tarha completely over her face, which vanished, leaving visible only the skin of her ungloved hands. We climbed into their Toyota, Sami and Noof up front, and headed out into the evening to shop.

The litany of “only nation in the world” rules in Saudi Arabia is familiar by now, partly because it provides such provocative news fodder for disapproving outsiders: The only nation in the world that prohibits women from driving cars. The only nation that requires every adult female citizen to live under the supervision of a legally recognized male guardian, her father or husband or some other family member, who must grant formal permission before she can obtain a passport, complete certain legal matters, or travel abroad. The last nation, other than Vatican City, to grant women the vote; the inaugural registration period was just six months ago, and women who lived more than walking distance from the sign-up sites needed men to chauffeur them there.

In Saudi Arabia all restaurants serving both men and women have divided eating areas, one for “singles,” which means men, and one for “families,” which means women, plus children and any men in their parties who are close relatives. Men and women not tied by blood or marriage can pretend they are, but risk rousting by religious police; law and social dictates prohibit them from sitting together. Inside shopping mall food courts, where Middle East brands compete alongside McDonald’s and KFC, gender partitions doubling as menu signs divide each stall’s ordering counter.

All sorts of practical matters, including the physical layout of buildings, are arranged in deference to mandates that Saudi women be segregated from men. When King Abdullah declared in 2011 that he would begin appointing women to the royal advisory council, the Shura, the ensuing national clamor—outrage from conservatives, elation from women’s advocates—included serious questions as to how these women could properly be seated. Should they be given separate chambers, with video links to their colleagues? Almost all Saudi schools are single sex, including faculty, and video is how some colleges handle lectures by professors of the wrong gender.

Even the “jobs feminization” campaign to encourage Saudi women to join the labor force, a five-year-old initiative also ordered and championed by Abdullah before his death last year, has come with elaborate segregation rules. After decades of an informal prohibition on women taking jobs that might place them in contact with men, certain kinds of retail stores have been ordered to hire female clerks, and the government is offering incentives for putting Saudi women on the payroll. The female supermarket cashiers, though, are grouped away from the male cashiers. Brand-new interior walls snake through department stores, separating male from female clerks. Every workplace that includes both genders is required to designate a no-men-allowed area where women can feel more “comfortable”—I heard that word from women, over and over.

So I would ask: Help me understand. Why is that more comfortable?

And the women’s answers almost always started the same way: Well, in the women’s area you can take off your abaya, relax, and ...

Why can’t you take off your abaya in front of the men?

This is when they would regard me levelly for a moment, and then sigh and nod, like, OK, here we go.

Because we are Saudi, and inside Saudi Arabia, we don’t. That would have been the easiest reply, but no one ever worded it that way; this obligation to hide the female form from nonfamily men, so perplexing and unsettling to outsiders, can be complicated for Saudis too. Nearly every woman who talked to me about covering invoked tradition, social pressure, religious devotion, tribal loyalty, and the primacy Saudi culture places upon respectability, the assurance that a woman’s honor—her fidelity and probity, if she’s married; her modesty and virginity, if she’s not—remains unimpeachable.

Do not imagine that the only enforcers of these standards are men, either. They’re mothers, aunts, sisters, female passersby who feel free to chide women they don’t know. “Why are you trying to attract men? Cover!” a 25-year-old Riyadh woman recited in frustration for me, mimicking scoldings from strangers. “It’s like she’s covering head to toe and asking other women to be exactly like her.”

Because each time I returned to the United States from Saudi Arabia, everybody I knew asked whether I had been forced to wear a burka, some wardrobe clarification may be useful. The Saudi women’s covering robe is the abaya—not the chador (Iran) or the burka (Afghanistan). Although very conservative women sometimes wear an over-the-head variation, abayas are generally neck-down garments; think of a judge’s robes. Women in public may shed their abayas in and around hospitals, inside certain gated residential areas for foreigners, and on the premises of women-only facilities. (One of the fanciest shopping malls in Riyadh, for example, contains a whole floor strictly for women.) Outside of those places: no. Men wear jeans or suits or the white Arabian robes called thobes. Women past adolescence, including expat corporate managers and visiting reporters, wear abayas.

Why black, which absorbs heat, in one of the hottest places on the planet? Speculative explanations abound: because black is unappealing to a man’s gaze, or because there’s an Islamic scriptural reference to women of the Prophet Muhammad’s time wearing clothing that made them resemble black crows. There’s no law that specifies abaya color. There’s no actual law requiring abayas, for that matter. Four decades ago, older Saudi women told me, protocols for covering and comportment varied across the kingdom, according to region, class, and one’s own family and tribal standards. The monarchy was a young nation then—established in 1932, newly flush with oil money, and still a patchwork of Arab cultures, from desert tribes with ancient traditions to cosmopolitan cities along the coasts. Although Islam of an especially conservative and all-consuming form was the faith of the whole country, its expression varied from place to place.

And in certain Saudi regions of that era, older women remember, there was nothing shocking about going out in a casual short abaya or wearing modest clothing with no outer cover at all. “Most of us went without veils,” a retired Riyadh pediatrician in her 70s recalled. “Sitting with a man you are not married to, in a restaurant? No problem, as long as you were behaving correctly. And then—the change. Some twisting, I will say. In the mind, in the heart.”

The change came in the 1980s, as conservative Islamist movements were burgeoning throughout the Middle East. The Saudi government, its legitimacy threatened by such upheaval, enlisted religious police in a kingdom-wide crackdown that imposed upon all Saudis the rigidity of its most conservative cultures. School curriculum was revamped. Music was silenced as un-Islamic. Couples walking or driving in public together were forced to show police their marriage licenses.

And central to the conservative crusade was the castigation of women: for succumbing to Western influence, for appearing outside the home without male guardians, for speaking in voices that might distract or seduce men, for dishonoring God by failing to drape themselves completely in black. In Arabic, Muslims use the word awrah to mean the more private parts of the body, those a respectable person always covers in public. Every society in the world has its own versions of awrah, and the Saudi Arabia of the past few decades has instructed all its faithful to regard as awrah not only a woman’s hair, as is widely taught across the Muslim world, but also her calves, her arms, and perhaps—depending—her face.

Saudis were amused by my efforts to grasp this “depending” part; it was like a newcomer to American culture interrogating one woman after another about the rules for displaying cleavage. We veil our faces, they would tell me, when it feels right. When our families follow imams who insist the face is awrah, even though other imams say it isn’t. When the boys we knew as children would be titillated and embarrassed to see our adult faces exposed. When the message we want to give off is respect me, not look at me. Women debate each other about the niqab, which is the word Saudis use for the black, tie-on cloth made specifically for covering the face; I once sat through a table-pounding niqab argument among three Riyadh feminists, one of whom insisted that any modern woman who “chooses” to veil her face does so only under pressure from the oppressive society around her. (“It’s NEVER a choice! It is dehumanizing to wear the niqab!” “How can you SAY that?” “NEVER A CHOICE!”)

It was Noof Hassan, in fact, who articulated the pithiest veiling explanation I heard, while she was at work one day and caught me watching her deft adjustments as she entered and exited the women-only factory area. Scarf off face, scarf back over face—Noof glanced at me and said lightly, “This is not something weird for us.” Saudi society is still tribal in many ways; women and men alike feel those around them watching, making assumptions about their family standards, passing judgment. Dayooth means a man who is not sufficiently vigilant about his wife and other female relatives whose honor he’s supposed to be guarding. It is an eviscerating label. “Wimp” does not begin to convey it.

“The problem is how they are thinking,” Noof said now, from the passenger seat of the Toyota. “This is the issue.”

Sami, behind the wheel, said, “When we go out to shop or something, I feel people look at her.”

“Staring,” Noof said. “Not just looking. Staring.”

The most disturbing stares, the ones that rattle Sami, come from men. “So I’m—‘Please, Noof, cover your face,’” Sami said. “So he doesn’t look to see my wife.”

I wondered about the Prophet Muhammad’s declaration that men have their own obligation to turn away from temptation and disrespect.

“Yes,” Noof said. “Sometimes I’m telling Sami, ‘The guy has to stop staring, because this is our religion. Why do I have to cover?’”

Sami was quiet, concentrating on the traffic. He’s a financial manager. He wears black-rimmed glasses and has a short beard and a gentle countenance. “My answer will be, this guy, he’s a Muslim, but he doesn’t follow Islam in the right way,” he said finally. “This man thinks, ‘She doesn’t cover her face because she likes people to look at her face.’ They think like this.”

I said that in many societies it was not uncommon for a man, when troubled by the way another man was contemplating his wife, to threaten to punch his lights out.

Sami nodded. He was smiling. “If I fight with the guy,” he said, “that means I fight every day.”

Noof chuckled. “Too much effort,” she said, from behind the black of her scarf. “Look, you can see everything. Try it.” I was wearing a tarha and tried to rewrap like Noof: twice around tightly, with the remaining scarf length pulled over my face. The cloth was sheer, evidently woven with this purpose in mind, and outside the car windows things were dimmer and grayer, but visible. A few blocks ahead, a lighted mall hove into view.

I needed a new abaya because a female Saudi acquaintance with a mordant wit had suggested that the fraying abaya I’d been wearing for weeks might best be retired by burning it. Emergency shopping help pls, I texted Noof, and Noof had texted back, sure my dear. Now we left Sami to stash the car alongside the other husbands and chauffeurs while Noof led me briskly to the abaya wing, where seven shops stood side by side, a plate-glass-fronted lineup of fluttering, shimmering shades of black.

“Whoa,” I said. Noof winked at me. She had rearranged her tarha to half veil—men don’t hang around abaya shops much. “I think this place first,” she said, eyeballing one of the entrance doors, and strode in.

An urban Saudi shopping mall can feel like a panoramic stage in which many tiny dramas peculiar to the modern kingdom are all under way at once. Young women window-shop with cell phones pressed to their ears, angling ice-cream cones or soda drink straws into their mouths beneath their niqabs. Pakistani and Filipino drivers nap in the parking lots or video call their overseas families, waiting for the women who employ them to emerge. (How do the drivers figure out which black-veiled lady is which? I once asked a Saudi friend. “Shoes and handbags,” she replied.) Inside the relief of reliable air-conditioning are playgrounds, furniture stores, eyeglasses stores, fitness centers, and supermarkets. There’s no other nexus of Saudi commerce so steadily populated by women, and after a while I found myself studying passing shoes and handbags, imagining them attached to women I was coming to know: the retired pediatrician, the graphic designer, the market checkout clerk, the business entrepreneur, the sociology professor, the lawyer who plays basketball three nights a week and is six feet tall, with a wicked layup.

That lawyer, a 30-year-old named Aljawharah Fallatah, plays in women-only gyms in girls’ schools or health clubs. Why not outdoors, where the young men go? Because that is where the young men go, and it would be cumbersome to play good basketball in an abaya. The point, Fallatah reminded me after a practice one evening, is that she’s a working attorney in a nation where, until the early 1960s, most girls had nowhere to attend school. A decade ago Saudi women were first allowed to study law. Three years ago the first women received permission to work as lawyers rather than just consultants. Women now make up more than half of the kingdom’s university students. When King Abdullah started a royal scholarship program for study abroad in 2005, women were included among its initial scholars; as of 2014, more than 35,000 Saudi women were enrolled in foreign undergraduate and graduate programs, with more than half studying in the United States.

And Fallatah now makes appearances in court. This is not to suggest any sort of parity for male and female professionals; Saudi women with advanced educations complain of underemployment and frustration in a society only beginning to accept females into high-level jobs. That’s a familiar lament, though, in nations much older than Saudi Arabia. “What we did in ten years is faster than what women in the United States did in a hundred years,” said Nailah Attar, the co-founder of a national initiative called Baladi, which means My Country. “We are running very fast to change very fast. I think we should slow down a little bit—so people accept it.”

Attar, along with other female business and academic leaders from around the kingdom, established Baladi five years ago to persuade Saudi women to accept the prospect of voting and running for office themselves. Hostility from traditionalists has been part of their challenge, but so has indifference, even from ambitious women: The first time in nearly a half century that Saudi men