I think they would definitely self-label as both feminist and egalitarian. In one case, both the husband and wife work and have kids, and for a while I think he was the primary caregiver because of the differing demands of their jobs. In another case (no kids) the woman and her male partner share household tasks equally but tend to fall in gendered roles out of habit (she does more cooking, he does more home repair, but they both do things like painting and cleaning).
Do they support affirmative action? I honestly don't know... it never comes up in conversation. I think many of them support allocating identical funds for male and female athletics in K-12 and colleges/universities. I've never heard any of them say anything like women should be paid more than men or given preferential treatment in business. Certainly nothing about quotas.
I agree that egalitarianism will compromise meritocracy, but in America we don't have a pure meritocracy anyway. If you're born into money, or if your family name is Kardashian or Bush or Kennedy, you're on third base already. If your family is affluent, white, and lives in the LA suburbs, you're going to have an easier time reaching your goals than if your family is poor, Latino, and lives in North Philadelphia -- no matter how hard you try. Now, we all know that life isn't fair, and we can never hope to make life completely fair. But economic disparities and lingering racial and ethnic and sexual prejudices mean that creating a perfectly-level playing field doesn't suddenly give everybody an equal chance.
I know the sorts of feminists you have encountered... I've gotten yelled at by at least one of them on Jezebel. There are jerks in any movement, usually at its radical fringes where the most passionate and alienated people tend to congregate. It's a corollary of egalitarianism that women can be rude, disgusting, obnoxious jerks... just like men. :-) When I find myself dealing with a jerk, I try to move slowly out the range of their spittle and venom, and find better people to talk to. Fortunately the jerks do not represent mainstream feminism -- which, like the mainstream of most movements, is pretty tame:
Marie Shear said, "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people". It sounds flippant, but to me it means this: at the core, women are simply not so different from men that they can't understand each other's viewpoint. The average Western woman wants the same basic things that the average Western man does: the right to control their own body, the right to pursue sex and the right to deny it, the right to vote and have a career and be a parent and worship the God they choose to worship without fear of violence being done to them, and the right to be judged by their capabilities rather than their appearance (or vice-versa, depending on the individual and the social context). To me, feminism means support of those rights -- nothing more and nothing less.
