The term identity politics was first used by the The Combahee River Collective to describe black women's struggle,
Thank you jj1968, I'm very familiar with the Combahee River Collective (and how various trans rights activists like to misrepresent their 1977 statement).
If you'd read a little further on the Identity politics Wikipedia page, you'd have found that it has been employed in myriad cases with radically different connotations dependent upon the term's context.
What the Black women of the Collective argued for (an intersectional analysis of the oppression of black women and the right to build a movement that derives from and builds on this analysis) and what is argued today in aid of identity politics are not the same thing. At all.
and feminists were attacked relentlessly by socialist men for placing 'identity politics' over class struggle.
I don't know why you think this statement here refutes my argument. Socialist men attacked socialist women for arguing for women's rights at the same time as they were also arguing for worker's rights over 170 years ago. A long long long time before before the term identity politics ever made it into the lexicon.
These women weren't even prioritising women's rights over and above worker's rights and were attacked for it. Clara Zetkin, for instance, one of the best known socialist politicians and women's rights campaigners had publicly agreed with her male colleagues, had famously denounced the movement for voting and property rights for women in 1889 and declared that women's rights must wait until after the revolution. Life - as a woman and single mother - changed her mind on that though. And in 1910, despite her credentials as an indefatigable campaigner for worker's rights, she was still publicly attacked by her male colleagues for championing an International Women's Day.
Women's labour - back then and today - must be devoted to just one cause, apparently. And it's not feminism.
The conflict inherent in all civil rights movements is that the women within movements other than feminism have historically been expected to prioritise "the cause" above women's rights. Not even a contemporaneous campaign efforts were approved of. Later. We'll help you fight for your rights later. A later which, as generations of women keep on finding out, never happens.
Have a look at the Scottish independence movement where this is playing out again right now, for all of us to see. Later. Later. Just do it later. Help us with this first.
Which has nothing to do with the concept of identity politics as it is used today, but with the fact that men on the right and the left of the political spectrum, whatever rights they were fighting for, saw, and largely continue to see women's rights as a trivial concern.