sit-ins against fascism and folk songs against autocracy

So, Saudi women's rights activists are campaigning to lift the ban on driving for women (link from Feministing).

They are doing this by collecting names on a petition ... and presenting the petition to the king.

I think the very idea of a "petition" implies a context of democratic government, one in which the collected opinions of many individual citizens are presumed to mean something, both morally, because the citizens are the government, as well as quantitatively, in terms of the number of votes an elected representative stands to lose by failing to meet the petition's demands. In other words, a petition implies that someone has reason to give a shit.

Now, certainly, the women's rights activists themselves don't have a whole lot of options, so I don't mean to denigrate their attempts. However, presenting a petition to the king is sort of like staging a boycott against your slave trafficker; there are larger, more systemic problems here.

I'm not sure feminism can even mean much of anything in the context of a non-constitutional* monarchy; the arguments for it generally proceed from an understanding of natural rights for all humans.

*The Saudi monarchy claims that the Quran is their constitution; I think Jefferson would find this idea somewhat wanting.