Feminism is closely associated with the left. However, I would argue that feminism is to the left what "family values" is to the right -- they are both forms of gynocentrism. The left/right dichotomy is itself false, because there are at least four quadrants to the political compass. There is libertarianism, and there is socialism, but there is also libertarian socialism aka anarchism.

A great many modern feminists claim that, historically, women were stuck in the home raising kids whilst men were permitted to pursue their "careers." If by "historically" they meant "1950's America" and by "women" they meant "bourgeois white women" then they are correct. Few men here would deny that it must have been boring and stultifying and humiliating to play the "weaker sex." But for non-rich men, it wasn't exactly a picnic to toil all day in a coal mine to support the wife and kids. Yes, women were oppressed. So were men.

Under civilization, 99.9% of the human race has never had the luxury of pursuing a "career"; both men and women have been forced to toil for survival. Prior to that, in the comparative luxury of the forest, the very concept of "work" was often foreign. This came as a great shock to many proto-anthropologists/Jesuits.

What are "traditional gender roles"? Traditional gender roles amount to men doing most of the hunting and women doing most of the gathering and child-rearing. If "traditional gender roles" are "wrong" then so was our entire pre-history. There is considerable anthropological evidence suggesting that women were actually LEAST oppressed when they performed these "traditional gender roles." Hunter-gatherer bands were/are highly egalitarian. Except in rare cases, usually involving extreme environmental stresses (e.g. the Inuit), women had more or less the same social status as men.

Only a pampered bourgeois elitist could ever conceive of work as liberatory. Work sucks.

Feminism is a bourgeois construct. We all like to imagine that "first wave feminism" was right and just, then, alas, during the 60's-to-present it sort of went off the rails. Modern feminism has attempted to adjust for its rather obvious rich-white-female bias by creating something called "intersectionality." "Kyriarchy" is another term being thrown about. But all these theories imply that females have been uniquely oppressed compared to males. The problem is that the historical record does not support this view. Most of us fell for it due to apex fallacy.

Karen Straughan suggests that males have a biological predisposition to support and protect females. Hence "benevolent sexism." I don't dispute this, but I think it's also pretty obvious that class is the deciding factor. Historically, upper class men AND women have shown little interest in the plight of the "common people," male or female. The first factory workers in the US were little girls. The Church didn't show much restraint during the Witch Hunt. And the only reason the (eventual) "nuclear family" developed in the first place was because the capitalist class realized that you couldn't have both men and women working full time in factories -- who would raise the next generation of labourers?

"Identity politics" -- you're a white/black/yellow/red/male/female/gay/straight/transgender person and should view everything through this prism -- is a divide and conquer strategy. It neglects the crucial issue of class. I'm not saying that the above issues aren't important, only that they serve as a distraction from brutal economic realities that our ruling class would rather we forget.

Surprisingly, the leftists of yesterday appear to have had a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of these issues. Women were already playing leadership roles in the IWW several decades before the Suffrage movement. Emma Goldman famously remarked that if "voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal," and dismissed [then] feminism as a "parlour affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people." Even Mother Jones, who was instrumental in abolishing child labour in the US [it still exists], regarded feminism as a tool of "plutocrats." The next time you debate a leftist on feminism, try these quotes...

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"[Mother] Jones had little patience with the concerns of upper class women. "The plutocrats have organized their women," she scoffed. "They keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity."

http://www.shmoop.com/history-labor-unions/gender.html

"While the IWW was unapologetically antiracist, it refused to involve itself in electoral activity and flatly opposed the suffrage movement, which they labeled “rich faddists for woman suffrage.” The IWW’s fiery organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn stated plainly, “To us society moves in grooves of class not sex.” At the same time, IWW organizers were outspoken in fighting for working women’s equality. The IWW made a point of encouraging women to take on leadership roles in strikes and other struggles, with tremendous success in the 1912 Lawrence textile strike. Flynn argued, “The IWW has been accused of putting the women in the front. The truth is the IWW does not keep them at the back, and they go to the front.”

http://isreview.org/issue/93/womens-liberation-marxist-tradition

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Rosa Luxembourg:

"Most of the bourgeois women who play the lioness in a fight against ‘male privileges’ would, once in possession of the suffrage, follow like meek little lambs in the wake of the conservative and clerical reaction. Indeed, they would surely be far more reactionary than the masculine portion of their class. Apart from the small number of professional women among them, the women of the bourgeoisie have no part in social production; they are simply joint consumers of the surplus value which their men squeeze out of the proletariat; they are parasites on the parasites of the people."

Emma Goldman:

"Needless to say, I am not opposed to woman suffrage on the conventional ground that she is not equal to it. I see neither physical, psychological, nor mental reasons why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man. But that can not possibly blind me to the absurd notion that woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed. If she would not make things worse, she certainly could not make them better. To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers. Since woman's greatest misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil, her true salvation lies in being placed on earth; namely, in being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes."

http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/bl_eg_an9_woman_suffrage.htm