Given how much hostility homemakers get in the US, it may not have been as positive as you imagine. I didn't find the article as shockingly positive as your remark led me to expect it to be.

I think of soccer mom in relatively neutral terms, but my feeling tends to be that it means "she's merely someone with no life for well-meaning but misguided ideas and not because she's outright depraved." Like it's an attempt to say "full time moms: not as bad as we usually think they are."

Anti-women groups use it in a derogatory way, so if you're in those communities that's how you'd see it used. Similar to how many people use feminism as an epithet.

I'm not in any anti-women groups, though I've known or read some people with anti-suburban bent (or rather, against American-style suburbia and suburban life), which is where I guess I must've picked up these connotations.

As for feminism, yes, I know a lot of people who use "feminism" as epithet and justifiably so, though one usually tries to attach some word to distinguish the crazies from those actually helping women; people I know in meatspace usually call it "belligerent feminism". A lot of those people are women! They prefer someone advocating for their rights instead of the people who use it as a pretext to destroy others or win spotlight for themselves; since the latter kind essentially appropriated the word "feminism" in public consciousness, these women decided to disassociate themselves from the movement.

If they have a category for "belligerent feminism" it sounds like they're still feminists and therefore they're not just "associating" with the movement, they ARE the movement!

Personally I don't let cranks define words for me. That includes feminist cranks and conservative cranks alike.

"Public consciousness" is worth paying attention to, but I'm not rewriting my dictionary based on it.