Depends on who you ask, what you classify as "feminism," and which era of feminism you are addressing.
Whoever my female family members owe their opportunities to doesn't change anything. The fact is that they were not dependent on men any more than women are currently.
It is not uncommon for feminists writing on Medium to claim that in the 1950s women were forced to marry in order to attain financial security. They state that in current times, women are now able to earn a living independently in contrast to the '50s. They imply, and sometimes explicitly state that the modern incarnation of feminism, which emerged in the public consciousness in November 1969, has rescued women from depending on men financially.
The women I described were women who came of age in the 1950s. The purpose of my comment was to illustrate that women in that era were indeed able to earn a comfortable living without depending on marriage to a man, just as they can today. I was presenting an alternative perspective to the idea that women in the 1950s needed to marry for financial security.
Modern feminism, which emerged in 1969, is not responsible for releasing women from some need to marry for survival; no such need existed at that time.
If feminism is 100 years old, then it is not responsible for the educational opportunities that were available to women as far back as 300 years ago...
...or for the women's colleges that have existed for the last 200 years...
I would question whether the women who founded medical colleges 200 years ago, can rightly be called "feminists" in the modern sense of the word:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_medicine#:~:text=Historical%20women%27s%20medical%20schools
Women have been practicing medicine for centuries:
There are profound differences in how women went about accomplishing what they did hundreds of years ago and the way modern feminists operate. The differences are significant enough that it would be misleading to apply the same term - "feminism" - to refer to both groups. They are distinct from each other.
