Behind the Hebrew word stands a genuinely ancient Mesopotamian complex, and the relationship is real but looser than usually claimed.
Akkadian sources have lilu and lilitu, and Sumerian has related terms, denoting a class of wind or night spirits associated with sexual predation, sleep and harm. Distinct from and often confused with them is Lamashtu, a specifically child-killing demon against whom protective amulets survive in quantity, frequently invoking Pazuzu as a counter-force. The etymology connecting the Hebrew word to the Akkadian is accepted; the assumption that a single continuous figure runs from Sumer to the Talmud is not supportable, and the popular claim that Lilith was originally a Sumerian goddess rests on a reading of a passage in the Gilgamesh material that its own translator later withdrew.
The function that carried across is protective magic. Aramaic incantation bowls from Mesopotamia in the fifth to seventh centuries CE, buried under house floors, name liliths among the spirits being bound, and Jewish amulets to protect women in childbirth and newborn infants against Lilith were in use into the modern period.
The reclamation is recent and explicit about being recent. From the 1970s, Jewish feminist writers took the Ben Sira story and read the refusal to lie beneath as a refusal of subordination, deliberately reversing the polarity of a text that had presented it as monstrous. The magazine named for her began in 1976. This is a knowing reinterpretation rather than a recovery of a suppressed original, and the writers who made it have generally said so.