DBTrek wrote:Did Apostle Peter call himself a Christian?
Did Ben Franklin call himself a founding father?
The word feminism was already coined and in use during the time of the suffragettes, and they didn't seem to feel the need to identify as that.
There was a legitimate movement one could call "first wave feminism" that was populated by socialists. The problem is that it was overtly and explicitly dedicated to the destruction of the human family, and modern feminism is very much trying to do that without admitting to it. They hijacked the suffragette movement because it would lend credence to them and, at the same time, subsume any legitimate women's rights movement under the feminist banner. It was more like an academic takeover of the women's movement by Marxists in the universities, which eventually spread throughout society (i.e. The Long March).
If feminism were literally coined in the 1950s and 1960s, then you could perhaps try to argue that these earlier women were feminists, I suppose, but there actually were feminists during that period and they were NOT the suffragettes. Lastly, that earlier anti-family form of feminism was arguably the progenitor of modern feminism, not suffragists.