I do remember my blue collar Daddy talking about a women who had joined the previously all male 'bull gang' at work. These were the newer workers, and they were given all the crap jobs, digging ditches, heavy work, etc. He was impressed that she worked as hard as the rest of them, and never asked for any special treatment.
One night, after supper, my Daddy picked up the broom and started sweeping the kitchen. My Mama asked him what he was doing, and he said "I'm gonna sweep and mop the kitchen!", like it was something he always did (not). Turns out, he had been chatting with this woman at work, and she'd been complaining that when she got home from work, her lazy husband sat on his butt complaining that his supper wasn't ready and the house wasn't clean enough. She said it never occurred to him that he could HELP her in any way. That made a real impression on Daddy, because by that point, my Mama was working full time because all of us were in school. From that day on, til the day he died, my Mama never swept, or mopped the kitchen after supper, he did. And it wasn't meanness on Daddy's part that he never helped, it just never occurred to him, and she never asked, because she'd always had older kids around to help her. It was just that he became aware of the need by talking to this woman. And she wasn't a feminist or anything, she was just a less fortunate woman looking to make some money for her family.
The brow beating and bitterness toward men on the part of the feminists was never necessary, because, as you said, the change was already in progress. The core leaders of the feminist movement did it to exacerbate the tensions that have always been there between men and women, but were never ugly before. I believe they created the 'movement' just to foment social change in the country, which would lead to increasing socialism, and that's exactly what has happened. By pushing the idea that women don't need men in their lives, they created a whole generation of women who now have to raise kids without benefit of a husband, and without family support like their generation had. Thus the demand for more government programs to help them.