One of the myths of the 1950s is that this was a decade of social stability, courtesy, and traditional family values. According to this view, it took the emergence of youth culture in the late 1950s, and the explosive impact of the promiscuous 1960s to shake up the status quo, and begin the process of dismantling the traditional family unit, rooted in marriage and sustained by the husband's wage, and the domestic travails of the wife. This is a narrative that locates modern, ‘second-wave’ feminism, taking root in the 1970s from the seeds sown in the 1960s, as the principal agent of transformation.

This outline history of gender relations accurately describes the drift of change, though it perhaps makes too much of the eventual visible manifestations of longer-term adjustments. It is certainly true that once modern feminism had been fully articulated, its tenets installed in the popular consciousness, the ambitions and desire of the populace in general (and women in particular) could not be fulfilled by traditional marriage with its built-in inequalities; but it is probably an over-simplification to mark a sharp dividing line in the 1960s between the Old and New Woman. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was neither as instantaneous nor so widespread as is sometimes assumed. Within a longer historical perspective modern feminism is given an unstoppable impetus in the Second World War. The war effort had depended upon the toil of women in the workplace so that the gendered pattern of work was drastically altered.