Maybe I simply have a hard time imagining a world where politicians listened to the demands and protests of the people and governed themselves accordingly.

Maybe 100 years ago politicians where less corrupt and more empathetic towards the problems of the working class people.

Maybe back then it was more difficult to pay off a few key people to let a bill pass in your favor.

Or maybe, an economic plan was created based on the post war industrial development in which out of pure desperation for manpower, women have proven themselves to be just as effective in working at factories as men. And in the name of improving effectiveness, this got the ball rolling to ultimately elevate women's rights on par with men's.

Feminism isn't some new last century concept. Women have been fighting for right for millennia but where always at bane of powers outside their control (AKA monarchs, the church, etc.). So there must be a good reason why it only worked out after the bloodiest most brutal self induced chapter of human history. What was the alternative, saying: "Thanks for the help, now go back home and tend to your crippled husbands."? That's actually exactly what governments did, and the result was a severely crippled economy that catapulted the world right into another World War.

No matter which country you're from, your great great mother has most likely contributed to getting the country through some of the worst times in it's history. A time when people weren't buried, they were dying in the streets and eaten by rats. And the reward was... that exception has turned into expectation. And as over the past 100 years almost all the money has wandered from the pockets of many into the pockets of few, women's right to work has turned into a necessity to work.

I don't believe for a second that the leaders of the 1920s had given women any more rights than in the centuries before out of the goodness of their hearts unless it was absolutely economically necessary.

Have you not noticed how workers have become customers to their own workplace? Corporation not only want to pay you less, they want you to give your paycheck back to them. And all the safeguards put up over the last decades for women in society and the workplace are being slowly dismantled by a very evident right shift of global politics. All to get you to the perfect algorithmically determined point of anger, desperation and contempt to make you pay exactly one cent less than the highest possible asking price for any given service (or as it was once called "product"). Modern day 1st world feminism is engineered. As evident by every corporation dropping the rainbow flags the second pride month ends, is that if corporations don't have to care - they won't. Feminism isn't excluded from that.