Live updates: Saudi women get behind wheel as driving ban ends

This Nov. 30, 2014 image was taken from a video released by Loujain al-Hathloul.

The first demonstrations for women's right to drive in Saudi Arabia began after the Gulf War. Female American soldiers, deployed to the kingdom during Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, were driving through military bases, exciting the imaginations of Saudi women.

In November 1990, 47 Saudi women drove through the streets of Riyadh in a motorcade protest. They were all arrested, and the country's highest religious body issued an edict banning female driving, adding what was a customary ban to the legal code.

The decades that followed the Riyadh protest were peppered with movements to lift the ban, but they really came to a head around the time of the Arab Spring in 2011. A social-media campaign called Women2Drive culminated in Manal al-Sharif's drive in Khobar. Some years later, other activists emerged at the forefront of the movement, including Loujain al-Hathloul (pictured above in 2014) who was detained for 73 days in 2014 after trying to drive from the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia