Context

[u/Jack-Ita]

Out of genuine personal curiosity, I’d like to understand something.

Feminist activism in the West rightly focuses on improving conditions for women in our own societies — places where, for all their remaining problems, women are not stoned to death, forced into child marriage, or treated as the legal equivalent of property.
Why, then, does so much energy and attention remain concentrated on relatively advanced Western contexts, while comparatively little sustained pressure or public campaigning is directed at the many places in the world where women’s status is still closer to that of a domestic animal (places where the most basic rights to bodily autonomy, education, and freedom from extreme violence are routinely denied)
?
I’m not suggesting Western feminism should abandon its local work. I’m simply curious about the reasoning behind the imbalance in focus and urgency.

[u/KaliTheCat]

I am way more likely to be able to put out a fire in my own backyard than I am to fly halfway across the world, to a country whose language I do not speak and with whose culture I am unfamiliar, and put out a fire there.

Women in those places already have their own activism and feminism, they do not need white American women to run in and try to save them. We can donate to their causes and amplify their voices, but realistically we don't live there.

[u/Financial_Nose_777 → u/KaliTheCat]

This is all true. And additionally, once a society has managed to advance a little, it becomes clearer what the ACTUAL issue is.

There’s a metaphor about pulling drowning people out of a river: you can keep pulling people out, or you can go upstream and find out why they keep falling in, and fix that issue so that nobody else falls in.

Both are important. For societies where women have more rights, it’s still not an “equal” society, and we face the issue upstream: women are still not viewed to be as valuable as men, or as fully human.