Yes, I'm going to solve the puzzle.

Feminists acknowledge that their movement was created by rich white women. This is one of the reasons why they created "intersectionality": guilt. The other reason is that they needed camouflage. Karen Straughan has compared intersectionality to croutons on a salad. It's still mostly lettuce.

A little known fact that is that many suffragettes opposed suffrage for non-propertied men and women. Another little known fact is that over half of the men slaughtered in WWI did not themselves have the right to vote -- women's suffrage was purchased with the blood of working class men. Yet another little known fact is that suffragettes in the US and presumably elsewhere were mostly racists. Modern feminists claim that this was due to feelings of betrayal in the wake of the civil war. I suggest that it wasn't so much a feeling of betrayal as a feeling of superiority. As the noted feminist Anna Howard Shaw complained:

“You have put the ballot in the hands of your black men, thus making them political superiors of white women. Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses!”

Bored rich women started the feminist movement, and very little has changed. This was not because these women were "oppressed", it was because they were privileged.

When we look at it in terms of relative deprivation we can see why rich women in the 19th century became increasingly disgruntled. It's similar to the way in which millionaires get pissed off that they aren't billionaires, and billionaires get pissed off that they aren't trillionaires. There's a really interesting study on this in Richard Conniff's "A Natural History of the Rich." The author, a zoologist, spent a decade hobnobbing with the rich and famous. His conclusion: rich people barely even think about poor people. A person who has $100 million dollars doesn't compare themselves to a MacDonald's employee. They compare themselves to a person who has $500 million dollars. A person with $500 million dollars compares themselves to a person who has a billion dollars. And so on and so forth. This is why feminists are obsessed with the glass ceiling rather than the glass cellar.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, "Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame."

It was fame, not wealth, that motivated first wave feminists.

They had everything their little hearts desired --- except for the superior social status of their husbands. Their husbands -- lawyers, doctors, politicians, businessmen -- had a degree of respect they could never achieve in their gilded cages. Poor men would have literally killed for their position, and sometimes did, but the rich woman regarded the poor man with a certain degree of envy. Despite his poverty and oppression, he had perceived agency. He was his own man. He could vote (on condition that he passed a poll test or had minimum property requirements). He was the master of his domain. Or so it looked, from above.

Viewed from the perspective of the 19th century rich woman, it all makes perfect sense. Why do I -- a superior, white, refined member of the ruling class, have less perceived agency than a fucking nigger or paddy working in a coal mine? Nevermind that she already had 1000x the influence of the coal miner, she wanted society to know it. And here is Alison Tieman's brilliant analogy, The Princess and the Plowhorse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAeSTsDc4qE

That is how feminism was born. Rich, jealous, spiteful women. Only a rich woman would have dared begin her new "feminist" campaign in Seneca falls with an all out attack against men. Elizabeth Stanton had the luxury to do so because she understood that there would be no repercussions -- ironically, due not only to her class but her sex.

There was already a woman's rights movement amongst the poor. It just wasn't called feminism. Poor women did not have the luxury of viewing the male as an enemy of the female. She didn't have nannies. She didn't have servants. She didn't eat ten course meals. She wasn't bored. She was too busy working. And she didn't regard work as a career designed to inflate social status but rather a matter of life and death. She understood that her father and brothers and sons were not oppressing her but working their hardest to protect and provide for her. The American woman nicknamed "rebel girl," Elizabeth Gurley Flynn of the anarchist union the IWW, stated that "society moves in grooves of class, not sex."

The Irish-American immigrant Marry Harris aka "Mother Jones", whose father had worked as a coal miner, dismissed the suffragettes:

Indeed, Mother Jones even argued that suffragists were naïve women who unwittingly acted as duplicitous agents of class warfare; she wrote in 1925 (after national suffrage had been achieved) that “the plutocrats have organized their women. They keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity.”

https://www.nwhm.org/education-resources/biography/biographies/mary-harris-mother-jones/

Mother Jones also dismissed the idea that women should be encouraged to work (i.e. become wage slaves), arguing that the majority of women would not have the luxury of "careers" but end up working in dismal conditions (globally, this remains true, and even in the first world, most women have simply exchanged loving husbands with asshole bosses).

Many women died during the worker's rights struggles of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Feminists? Not so much. The one casualty was a British woman who threw herself in front of a horse.

Working men engaged in literal battles with police, private armies, state militia and federal troops, culminating in the battle of blair mountain after WWI. Thousands of corpses later, during the great depression, unions were finally recognized.

What did women have to do to achieve their "rights"? They had to ask for them.

So much for "patriarchy."

And now we arrive at the conclusion: feminism does not exist because of female oppression. Feminism exists because of female privilege. Women are not the weaker sex, women are the more powerful sex.

It's about time women acknowledge their power and act accordingly.