The best answer to this is that some progress was made, but not nearly as much as many women would have liked.
During the mid-1970s, there were definitely improvements made in the status of women. The most important of these changes in legal terms was the Supreme Court’s decision in Frontiero v. Richardson. In this case, the Court had to decide whether the Air Force could provide benefits to the wives of male officers while refusing to provide them to the husbands of female officers. This sort of law had been rather common in the United States. In Frontiero , however, the Court struck down this sort of law. It said that the government had to have a good reason to discriminate on the basis of sex. It did not give sex the same level of protection that race got, but it still gave much more protection to women...
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than it had before.
However, the mid-1970s were also the time of a major disappointment for women. This came as the Equal Rights Amendment failed to be ratified. This amendment would have said that
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
However, conservative opposition to the amendment led to it being rejected and women did not get the degree of progress that they had hoped for.
What progress was made for homosexuals regarding freedom, equality, and opportunity in the mid-1970s?
There was not very much progress at all made towards equal rights for homosexuals during the mid 1970s. The major goals of the gay rights movement remained unachieved until at least the turn of the century and many of them have still not been achieved today.
During the 1970s, gay rights activists were mainly pushing for two main things. They wanted laws that would protect them from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. That is, they wanted laws that would make it illegal to do things like firing someone because they were gay. They also wanted an end to laws that made homosexual conduct illegal. They did not achieve either of these.
For example, gay rights advocates did manage to get an anti-discrimination law passed in Dade County, Florida. But a backlash arose and roughly 70% of voters voted to repeal the law. It was not until 1982 that a state passed an anti-discrimination law. Many states still do not have them and neither does the federal government.
As to laws banning homosexual conduct, these laws remained on the books until 2003. In 1986, such laws were upheld by the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick. It was not until the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas that such laws were ruled to be unconstitutional.
Gay rights advocates made very little progress in the 1970s. They did not gain any real legal victories and they did not achieve much in the way of social acceptance either.