Even for the casual observer, it has been a triumphant year for women’s sports. Spring witnessed the highest-profile women’s college basketball tournament ever, with Iowa’s Caitlin Clark becoming the sensation of March Madness. The WNBA, after 26 seasons, is finally gaining traction on TV and attendance was up 16% this season. In soccer, the Women’s World Cup was a rousing success and the domestic league, the NWSL, just concluded its 10th full campaign. In September, American tennis sensation Coco Gauff, 19, won the U.S. Open women’s singles final with a stirring comeback, in a match that earned higher TV ratings than the men’s final. Ten days earlier, 92,003 fans paid admission to watch the University of Nebraska women’s volleyball team win a match at the school’s football stadium, the largest attendance for a women’s sports event in history.

It’s easy to assume that these gains are the inevitable product of Title IX, the law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education. Two generations of Title IX legislation has given women’s sports a vital seismic jolt, but it took a confluence of events in the 1970s to make today’s breakout possible. That messy, eventful decade was decisive in bringing spectator sports into the cultural mainstream, with the advent of “Monday Night Football” on prime-time network television, the dawn of free agency and more extensive integration within sports.