Back to what I was getting at, marriage has declined since ~1980, and that's going to be the single biggest link to female employment. Since marriage or employment, you gotta pick one. However ... it happened in
about 100 countries at the same time whether or not they had a strong feminist movement and whether or not they educated girls. So ... it's more likely to be an evolution that
had to happen, because of technological and economic necessity rather than being some magic wand that some movement can claim.
e.g. if you take the Historical Materialism theory, it postulates that different stages of economic development were
inevitable e.g. mercantilism follows feudalism, and is followed by capitalism. You can have a few holdouts, but the trends are inevitable. We can apply that same logic to socioeconomics, e.g. changes in technology cause
consistent changes in socioeconomic organization, and these shape the parameters for how people live. Social mores then follow on from that. e.g. women didn't work in wage jobs, but then they started to. Cars and public transport
probably was more important than activists for making that practical and safe, plus the rise of office jobs / bureacracy and a consumer economy.
None of that was "caused" by feminists. Women weren't allowed in some pubs, because those were drinking establishments for working men, but when women started working wage jobs, then pretty soon they started to be allowed into the same drinking establishments. Was that because "activists" or because "good business sense"? Probably as soon as women had expendible capital, then being allowed in pubs was inevitable. So again, economically necessary change in response to technology, rather than some amazing thing that "only" happened because of fringe activists.
This would in fact be a
consistent Marxist interpretation of the history of female suffrage. If you're going to cherry-pick Marx you should at least
consistently apply his theories however the chips fall. e.g. in
actual Marxist theory any "patriarchy" should in fact rise or fall purely because it's a reflection of the economic status quo, and that status quo changes not because of a "vanguard party" but because of changes in technology (the means of production). Marxist Feminism is therefore not valid since they don't apply Marxist theory in a consistent fashion. If you properly apply Marx's ideas to the rise of female employment, then it devalues the idea that a "movement" of great leaders
caused there to be job opportunities for women. That ... just doesn't make any economic sense.
But if a movement
happened to be around at the right place at the right time, and advocating for something similar, it's easy to see how causation and correlation could be confused, the same as Rudy Giuliani falsely took credit for the decline in crime in New York (despite
every big city in America having the same decline in the same time period).