Early feminism did help women win the right to vote and put pressure on our criminal justice system to get tough on rape. Since then, however, it has completely jumped the shark and brought us the sexual revolution, sex positivism, friends with benefits, and all sorts of cultural garbage.
I often like to think about Sarah Palin showing the more nutty feminists what it means to be a real woman.
I agree about Palin completely, but I don’t think that the suffragists were feminists. For the most part they fought for the Natural Rights of women, but not the abolishment of the family or marriage. This is good and normal.
Feminists are part of the anti-family “Free Love” movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_love
“In 1857, Francis Barry wrote that “marriage is a system of rape,” stating that the woman is a victim where she can do nothing but be oppressed by her husband, as he tortures her in her home, which becomes a house of bondage.[6] In one of his articles, Barry wrote:
‘The Object of this [women’s emancipation] Society,’ according to Article 2 of its [free love] constitution, ‘shall be to secure absolute freedom to woman, through the overthrow of the popular system of marriage.’[7]”
Francis Barry, although a male, is a feminist. Men started the Free Love movement and, even today, are the main beneficiaries through no-ties sex. Margaret Sanger is a feminist.
“Gloria Steinem at one point stated, “you became a semi-nonperson when you got married.” She also famously coined the expression ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle...
...Another member of the circle was pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft felt that women should not give up freedom and control of their sexuality, and thus didn’t marry her partner, Gilbert Imlay, despite the two conceiving and having a child together in the midst of the Terror of the French Revolution. Though the relationship ended badly, due in part to the discovery of Imlay’s infidelity... “
Feminists are simply an offshoot of utopians, radicals, communists, anarchists. They’re for the destruction of Natural Law, not the enhancement of it. They see marriage and society in general as imposed and unnatural. Many are or were mentally ill.
They choose to follow their own will, which in some cases is admirable. But, in this case it is simply destructive. So I don’t see “feminism” as a continuation of the suffragist movement or the women’s rights movements. The hisories are parallel and some of the interests were mutual, but the goal of feminism is the same as all utopians - subjugation of society to their wills. Feminism is anti-women.