The 1970s were when women were first allowed to go to West Point. I still remember the front page pictures. There was something not too long ago about one of those first graduates retiring.
Not a lot of books available for girls/women. I liked mysteries, action-adventure, and science fiction. If I wanted a girl/woman main character, all I had was romance novels and nurse books. Even the girl detectives of the time (Nancy Drew, Kim Aldrich, Trixie Belden) often got into situations where the guy had to rescue them. With other kinds of action books, if there was a girl in the story, she often existed to be kidnapped and didn't do anything to help herself get rescued. More often, she was pretty close to being wallpaper. Best selling novels of the time:
http://www.caderbooks.com/best70.html
Star Trek fandom started to snowball--about 1976. Fans were called "Trekkies" at the time, and I think it puzzled a lot of people. What appealed to me about Star Trek was that it had woman who was an officer on the bridge. When I was getting books where the girl was next to incompetent, it was absolutely fantastic. She even had action scenes (and if you've seen the show, you know they're not much of action scenes, but they were more than any other show or book was doing at the time). Nichelle Nichols, the actress, helped NASA to recruit blacks and woman for the space program.
Shows new at the time were Emergency, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, The Bionic Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, Little House on the Prairie, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Facts of Life, The Love Boat, All in the Family, MASH, Charlie's Angels, Starsky and Hutch, Baa Baa Black Sheep (now known as Black Sheep Squadron), Rockford Files, Wonder Woman, and The Mighty Isis. Charlie's Angels and a couple other shows were known as the "jiggle" shows. Farrah Fawcett-Majors had a best-selling poster that's tame today--but what it showed at the time was a huge deal. Very little profanity got on the air. They had to work to get one word in. In rerun during the day, we got black and white and color. Whatever was available. We saw Little Rascals and Three Stooges in the afternoon on TV, along with the 1950s bug movies. Later, by the 1980s, a lot of the b/w shows and movies started disappearing.
Movies included The Exorcist, which was extremely controversial for its subject matter. Also, Irwin Allen's disaster movies were blockbuster hits. So was Jaws, which was based on a best-selling novel. Roots was a huge mini-series on TV. And we had made for TV movies on the networks. Star Wars came out in 1977 and had people lined up around blocks to see it. The movie cost $10 million dollars.
No big box stores. You could walk down the street to a local drugstore run by a couple of guys who greeted you by name. Bookstores were small nooks.
Technology: Concorde made its first flight; space shuttle made its first test launch (called the Enterprise as a result of a mailing campaign by Star Trek fans). No computers. I typed all my writing on a manual and then an electric typewriter (my father purchased one of the very early personal computers, which was, I believe in the early 1980s). Phones would probably still be rotary dial in many homes, though these were being phased out. You would still be able to find black and white TVs in homes, and cable TV did not exist. The late 70s started to see VCRs. Music used records, tapes, and 8 track.
