Allat responded to part of it, but Iggy did not. Iggy, Angel and Manat, I'd like to hear from you on this topic
Dammnit, I have two research projects I'm working on, but I have this compulsion where if I don't respond right now, when I first see it, then it will become one of the 45 open tabs on my browser and I may forget about it until next week.
To state it in concise question: "Is first-world feminism, in countries with fairly low domestic abuse rates, and where abortion is legal and the issue mostly settled, still relevant?"
And a related question I just thought of "In light of your answer to the above question, or, independent of it-- what do you think the relationship between feminists in the developed world, the Europe, the US, and Canada in particular, and those in the developing and underdeveloped world? I understand there are gradations even within developing and underdeveloped countries, and that economic development isn't the be all and end all. For example-- the social power of working-class women in Mexico is larger than that of women in Qatar.
Yes, feminism is still relevant.
What is "fairly low" when we are talking about violence against women? In the US, it's estimated that one out of every four women experiences violence at the hands of a male partner (
http://new.abanet.org/domesticviolence/Pages/Statistics.aspx). According to Women's Aid, one out of four women in the UK experiences domestic violence, and two or more women per week are killed by an ex-partner (PDF:
http://www.womensaid.org.uk/core/core_picker/download.asp?id=1602). In Germany, one out of every five women experiences violence at the hands of her partner. The Aussie government estimates that one out of three Australian women experiences domestic violence and one out of five experiences sexual violence. And that's just a handful of Western countries. So what is "fairly low?"
Oddly, one of my projects is related to domestic violence offender rehabilitation programs and the rate of recidivism.
Abortion is legal in the United States, but with what crippling restrictions and for how long? Feminists and others got lax on this particular issue, and look where we are now.
But does feminism go beyond a woman's right not to have the shit kicked out of her by her husband or her right to decide what to do with her uterus, or even her right to earn a dollar for every dollar a man earns? It must. There is more to fighting to have a woman viewed as an equal and as deserving of the same considerations men get, culturally, than having DV hotlines in every state. Patriarchy has colored every aspect of our culture.
And it must extend beyond her borders as well. Yes, many feminists in the first world have a paternalistic, condescending, even racist attitude towards women in other countries and cultures. And the feminism(s) that they stand behind may not work for, say, Maori women or Mayan women or Egyptian women or Kazakh women. The Feminist Majority Fund's early campaigns for the rights of women in Afghanistan was an example of this. It was clumsy, condescending, and ignored the pleas of Muslim and Afghan women here and abroad to be included or even to correct some of what they were saying.
But that doesn't mean that first world feminists are irrelevant or that feminism is, somehow, now passe because the FMF didn't adequately understand the the cultures and religions of Afghanistan, or even because they alienated other Afghan women's groups by all their attention (and hence, the American media's attention) on the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan.
Topic: Are you a feminist?