If we are talking about the US, then they were not huge. They just seemed huge because the public media gave us Leave it to Beaver and then all of a sudden we got mass protests on TV. The changes had been going on since the Civil War. After World War 2, however, we were engaged in the Cold War and we needed to present an image of unity at home and abroad. That Image covered up the millions of disenfranchised blacks and millions of women who were demoted from good paying war jobs and returned to low paying labor.

Also in the 1950s and 1960s a new generation of people were getting into college and reading a history that they knew left a whole lot out. Black college students asked about black people, women asked about women, every ethnic group started asking "What about us?"

Add to that the new medium of TV to create public issues of things like segregated lunch counters and people being killed for trying to enforce the 14th amendment and now that the fight that had been going on for 100 years was not just in a corner of the newspaper, but in your living room every night.

With all these visual records and the hard core propaganda in the 1950s it isn't difficult to understand how you think the changes would be radical, but they were really just continuations of previous bursts of social change.