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Many early feminists and advocates of women's rights were considered left-wing by their contemporaries.

Feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft was influenced by the radical thinker Thomas Paine.

Many notable leftists have been strong supporters of gender equality, such as: the Marxists Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai, the anarchist Emma Goldman, and the socialists Helen Keller and Annie Besant.

Marxists such as Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai however, though supporters of radical social equality for women, opposed feminism on the grounds that it was a bourgeois ideology.

Marxists were responsible for organizing the first International Women's Day events.