I do not think every generation is any better than the previous, just different and building on what the previous generation has done, each in reaction to the one before.
When Jane Austen's nephew, in old age (1870s) wrote his memoir of his aunt and had to describe ways of life common in the late 18th/early 19th century, he sounded just as sanctimonious as quite a number of GNners, in seeing his age as an age of virtue and knowledge so much more moral and pure than that that preceded it and referring to how the younger generation would be shocked to know some of the things that were done then in the best of households. Gentlemen rubbing down their own horses was, I think one of them.
Every generation thinks they invented sex and invented parenting just because the, themselves, haven't done it before. Remember Philip Larkin and Sexual intercourse began, In nineteen sixty-three, (which was rather late for me) -Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban, And the Beatles' first LP.?
Back in the early 1960s I went to university to study economics and made a career in industry, my best friend became a lawyer, another a doctor. This despite a childhood of reading literature which showed women in gender specific roles. I wonder why? probably because gender roles in fiction had as much affect on us as all the wonderfully improbable adventures the Famous Five got up to or happened in the mythical Chalet boarding school, about as far from real boarding school and its mundane life as was possible. Because we were quite capable from telling fact from fiction and, most importantly parents even then brought girls up to think about education, and careers as seriously as their brothers, divorce may have been less common, but two generations of women had lived through 2 world wars that left many married women with children, widows with only small pensions and a need to work to support their families.