JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- It doesn't take long upon arrival in this desert kingdom to realize the rules have changed. At the King Abdullah airport, the VIP waiting lounges designate separate rooms for men and "ladies," so the sexes will not mix. At the Crown Plaza hotel, beyond its entirely male staff, a sign by the pool reads, "no women allowed."

There were six women among the 22 editorial writers and columnists I traveled with recently to Saudi Arabia, and most of us were never so happy to leave a place.

Under Wahhabism, the strict interpretation of the Islamic faith observed in this officially Muslim country, men and women must be strictly segregated.

In Saudi Arabia, women are punished for men's desires. The entire society is built on this premise.

Walk by the shores of the Red Sea or the bustling local marketplace and few women are about. When they do present themselves in public, they are covered head-to-toe in a black veil and abaya, a garment ironically resembling a shroud. Any evidence of female immodesty may draw the attention of the mutawwa'in, the state-run religious police, who are ever-ready with a tongue lashing or a real one.

The place for Saudi women in their own society is behind walls -- the walls of their residential compound, the walls of their fabric prison, and the walls of religiously enforced patriarchy. They are not allowed to drive or to hold a job in which they interact with men. More walls.

A personal connection and some unguarded truths

Only the women journalists are invited to the home of Amal Fatani, a U.S-educated pharmacology professor with a specialty in venomous scorpions. At Fatani's high-walled, whitewashed residential compound, there is no landscaping or adornment between the outer walls and the front door, only concrete. The interior life is what matters here. Inside, her home is comfortably air-conditioned and elaborately furnished. It can easily accommodate the dozen or so friends and guests she has brought here to discuss the role of women in her country.

The Saudi women want us to know one thing straight away: They are the most spoiled ladies in the world.

These well-off, highly educated and accomplished women tell us of the two and three drivers available at their beck and call. "Who needs to drive?" Fatani says on behalf of the group, with a little too much intensity. There is a defensiveness in the room. They don't want pity or fury on their behalf. They know we sit with judgmental eyes.

Still, we see the machinations these women go through to meet with us.

The men from our group are excluded, so the women don't have to be in the company of unrelated men. Each woman has come with a driver who waits for her out in the heat. As they enter Fatani's house, the women are completely obscured by their black robes. It isn't until they unfurl their coverings that real women emerge: professors, business owners and a school superintendent -- all employed in the female side of this balkanized economy.

These women are stylish. They wear sleeveless shirts, fitted skirts and jeans. Beautifully made up and coifed, they could have blended in with the women of any European capital.

Almost all of the women had lived in the United States for a time, studied there, had children study there, yet they willingly returned to a country that casts them in the role of temptress and denies their full worth. For them, family, religion and community are more important than American-style independence, individuality and equality. They proclaim their culture, pointing out that here parents aren't relegated to nursing homes and the generations take care of each other. But underneath the puffed pride for visitors is a painful recognition of a society seriously out of step with the 21st century.

These women may feel personally empowered, but only because they are lucky enough to have fathers and husbands who allow them that measure. Women here must do as men say. They cannot so much as make a hotel reservation -- never mind choose an education or a career -- without their father's or husband's express permission.

The government conspires against them, too. As recently as 1995, the Ministry of Commerce prohibited women from gaining business licenses for jobs that might require them to work with government officials, supervise foreign workers or interact with male clients.

Under the Saudi's strict interpretations of Sharia, the Islamic legal system, it takes two women to equal the testimony of one man, justified because women are emotional and don't think with their head like a man. In divorce, women lose custody of their sons after the age of 7 and their daughters after the age of 9. Men also can have up to four wives. All this is from the ancient Hanbali school of the Koran, and these women say they live by its word -- often, when pressed, with a despairing shrug.

They point to the good things Islam has brought women: education for girls and the right of women to keep their own money. They say some of the harsher dictates of Islam, such as women wearing the abaya, are interpretations by radicals and not the religion itself, and they hope for change.

When change will come is hard to say. Our familiar mechanisms for change: writing, speaking out, organizing, are not available here. The repressive Saudi royal family controls the news media, limits expression and does not allow the formation of civil societies. Instead, change has to bubble up on its own.

"To get equality, we will have to wait for our grandfathers' generation to die, and maybe our fathers' too," said Ghada Fahd Al-Tobaishi, owner of her own marketing business, who lived for a while in San Francisco.

When protests do occur, they are put down quickly. Fawziah Al-Bakr, a professor of education, recounts her experience during the Gulf War, when she and a group of women tested their manacles. "There were 47 women in 15 cars, and we decided to drive," she said. "We drove for half an hour, and we were caught by the police. They arrested us, but were nice."

She said they weren't kept in jail long, though in some ways the confinement was for their own protection. Fundamentalists had been whipped into a lather and might have done her harm. The protest set off a conservative backlash. Women driving was decried as a mark of deteriorating morals, and Al-Bakr was punished with a two-year suspension from her job.

Dates, camels and oil

How can a country with such a first-world veneer retain such anachronistic divisions? The answer is "dates, camels and oil." As one Western diplomat told us, these three things constitute the whole of Saudi Arabia's assets. And while dates and camels might not get you far in the international marketplace, oil will. In the 1930s, this newly minted country of united tribes and nomads won the world's lottery. Just about the time the West was developing an insatiable thirst for the stuff, the Saudi's -- thanks to U.S. geologists -- found they were sitting on 260-billion gallons of oil -- a quarter of the world's reserves.

They were rich overnight, and the wealth was laid on top of a culture that only a generation ago had been living in tents. For decades, the Saudis saw their standard of living soar without having to make any of the internal changes typically necessary to advance an economy. They had no need to decentralize power, get rid of the wasteful dual economies for men and women, utilize all their human capital or open up to foreign investment and ideas.

Allow people to be rich through their own initiative, and the resulting dynamism moves society along. Allow them to be rich through the beneficence of the government, and society stagnates. The Saudis may construct office towers with gleaming facades and modern amenities, but inside the business being conducted is a one-trick pony.

Hope for change

Change for women may be on the horizon, ironically provoked by new economic realities more than a sense of justice.

To have a banking system, the Saudis conveniently found a way (through an elaborate fiction) around their religion's clear prohibition on charging interest. In the same way, worsening economics could force them to find a way to loosen religious restrictions on men and women working together.

Despite the nation's astounding oil wealth, personal incomes are dropping fast. Fewer than 20 years ago, per capita income stood at $19,000, today it's around $7,500. Blame the country's backward demographics. Seventy percent of the population is under 19. On average, women bear six children. Their one-dimensional economy simply cannot absorb these numbers, particularly with so many young people coming out of school with unmarketable degrees in Islamic studies.

Restrictions on women contribute greatly to the country's declining prospects. The government invests heavily in the education of girls and then leaves their human capital untapped. While 58 percent the university graduates are female, they make up only 5 percent of the workforce. Relegated to the home, and in accordance with their religion, many women have little to do but raise children.

If incomes keep dropping, even well-to-do families may soon find it difficult to employ drivers for their wives and daughters.

The influence of satellite television adds to these pressures. Owning a satellite dish was technically illegal until a little over a year ago, but the law was roundly ignored. Virtually every roof and balcony sports a dish that receives programs from around the world. On their television screens, Saudis are viewing women in every kind of role: as news anchor, police investigator, business leader and even, unfortunately, beach bimbo.

Finally, the Saudi business community is now desperate for foreign investment and a more diversified economy. The Western money they crave may come with female managers and progressive demands regarding the role of women.

During an interview at his Jeddah palace, the country's de facto leader Crown Prince Abdullah was not willing to acknowledge the pressures for change. Of women driving, Abdullah said through an interpreter, that it "is something of very little importance. The first thing (for women) is to keep a house, her children and her reputation."

His statements aside, we know he has been a force for small reforms. The country recently granted women access to a national identity card that will allow them to open a business, a bank account and register for school -- of course, their husbands or fathers have to grant them permission to get one.

Despite small steps, the women of Saudi Arabia are a long way from enjoying a life with any semblance of autonomy. A Canadian doctor at the King Fahad National Guard Hospital in Riyadh, one of the few places where men and women can work together, says he sees rampant clinical depression among women. But he can't get it diagnosed, because their husbands or fathers are always in the room during exams. A nurse from Germany confirms the problem, describing the many cases of attempted suicide she's seen. Women drink bleach as a way of getting out of a miserable arranged marriage.

To be fair, this bleak assessment must be weighed against the insistence by nearly everyone, from the all-male Chamber of Commerce to the educated women at Fatani's house, that their society's arcane rules are bound to bend.

The question is when.

In the meantime, leaving Saudi Arabian terra firma for a Western woman is like being released from a vise. The fun house tour is over and you can let your shoulders relax, there won't be anymore unfriendly surprises.

As we checked into our next destination, the Nile Hilton hotel in Cairo, my collegues and I made a bee-line to the hotel bar to share a beer -- liquor is illegal in Saudi Arabia. We toasted our return to sanity. We were a group of journalists once again, no longer strictly defined by gender or religion.

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