I'll bite.

Feminism is not one thing. We use these big categories but they are utter bullshit. The same second wave feminism you talk about did all the things you say. It also created Lesbian separatist communes and Andrea Dworkin saying all heterosexual sex is rape.

Because of the timing (the big dreams of the sixties and seventies) people took some fucking radical approaches. And by 'radical' I don't mean extreme (though that applies in some instances). I mean radical in the sense of 'root' or the notion that we have to completely uproot society in order to fix the gender inequality. And a lot of those ideas were fucking dumb. As was Abby Hoffman's plan to run a pig for president and Lennon's plan to have a bed-in for peace. It was a radical time. It was a time in which people thought they had to start over, uproot, and basically overthrow the standard to achieve change. This is coming on the tail end of the red scare, so that seemed way more possible than you and I can imagine. The mindset was incredibly different.

Feminism is not one thing. Huge chunks of the second wave thinkers made incredible positive changes. Some people were assholes. That's the same thing in every movement, in every decade, in every instance. There are ideas in every movement that are valuable, and there are always fringe nutcases. The problem is not saying that any branch, any thinker, any idea in feminism is good or bad. That's nuanced and important, but that's not what we talk about on the internet. We can't even really say "better". What is better? That is a complicate assessment. Was the second wave positive because it brought woman more fully into the work place? Sure. But now women hold jobs AND do the majority of the child care and house work, but we now see that changing in a dramatic way. What was 'better'? It is different, that's for damn sure. But if we hold the second wave to saying all women should forsake men, round them into pens and shoot them, or become political lesbians we can laugh them off the stage. Every iteration of feminism has good ideas, bad ideas, and insane ideas. LIKE EVERY OTHER ISM.

Yes, great changes were made. Yes, a lot of bad politics came out of that same movement. Yes, second wave feminism largely ignored racial and class differences that crippled generations of poor women and women of color. How do we measure good? How do we measure bad? It's all just a stream of ideas about to make things better. Some ideas are good and they stick and we work towards them. Some ideas are shit. Feminism is a lot like Reddit. You hope the cream rises to the top but sometimes the good ideas are buried and we instead get to read the sensational.

Here's the real answer: feminism is good. The idea that we need equal genders is a good one. How we get there? That's where that breaks down. Because there's a wild mix of excellent and horrible suggestions in that box and we just sort through it with time. We're all working towards the same thing. But every movement, every instance of that movement, has the same suggestion box. Should we ship back newly freed slave to Liberia? Should we execute the capitalists? Are debtors prisons back in style? Do abortion clinics need to have full ER access? We're always going to wrestle the shitty ideas of the moment. And some people who wrestle will suck. It is not about the particular moment, is about the good ideas overcoming the bad ones, and helping to make things better. And that has been pretty much constant through history, including the idea that we educate women and that we don't forcibly sterilize the mentally disable.

The second wave wasn't anything special. It is just far enough removed in time that we have perspective. It had its flaws and gems like any other time. It is the same fucking story over and over again.