I think that's a great definition, Meredithbead. It's so important too that we remember the history, so that our rights aren't taken away.
Feminism was far from being a male invention -- there's been so much resistance to women having equal rights an opportunities and we should never forget that. Women started in the 1840s trying to get equal rights of citizenship (the earliest part of the First Wave of feminism, with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton). In most states when these women addressed the public, even that was illegal for women to do.
Many early feminists worked to abolish slavery, and black males got the right to vote 50 years before any woman did. In the 19th century, women couldn't even own property and had no right to custody of their children. The only jobs open to respectable women were as governesses, and eventually as school teachers (if they weren't married). Then when waves of immigrants came, they could work as factory laborers. It was even illegal for women to wear pants! We couldn't vote until 1923.
As I see it, men have been unwilling to share power. They probably think that women will enslave them as they've done to us for centuries, all over the world. Think about it. In many of the poorest countries, women do ALL the work (haul water, grind the flour, tend the children, farm in the fields), while men (the big game hunters? ha!) go to town and go to the bar, and play dice, etc. At the 1995 UN conference on women in Beijing, China, women got together and compared notes. This situation was pretty widespread.
That your husband, smilingthrulife, insisted that you work only indicates how weak the women's movement has been in the last 30 years. There's been a tremendous backlash, and lots of loud male voices bashing feminism. Rush Limbaugh uses the term "femi-Nazi" and he and many loudmouths say that any female interested in feminism (i.e., equal rights) is probably really fat and ugly and can't get a man or is a lesbian. Apparently such tactics have made it so that many women are afraid to be labeled "feminist."
I was involved in some of the earliest "Consciousnes Raising" groups ( a term coined by the feminists) in 1970 in Boston when I was in college. It was an exciting time. My mother was appalled at what I was doing, and said what you said, that "women's lib" was a male plot to get women out of the house. (She later ate her words, I might add, and went on to have an exciting career of her own, after the kids were out of the house.)
When most boomers were kids in the 50s, what occupations were open to women? nursing, teaching, secretary, model, sales clerk...? that's certainly changed.