That's not a subtext but a historical reality: economic liberalization, which destroyed the mythical norm of post-WW2 capitalism (e.g., working-class men, emulating the ruling class, could aspire to have their wives stay at home as "homemakers," and unionized ones in high-wage, oligopolistic sectors, earning "family wages," in fact often did), created circumstances under which struggles for equal rights (between races, genders, sexual orientations, and so on) made progress. That's been the case from North to South, West to East: economic and social liberalizations tend to go hand in hand; and increasing achievement of equal rights (between races, genders, sexual orientations, etc.) tends to widen class disparity. South Africa is perhaps the most obvious example of this global historical trend, but so are the USA, Cuba, Israel, and Iran, to take four countries whose ideologies are otherwise very different.
Whether economic liberalization is a necessary condition for social liberalization or the former merely accidentally coincided with the latter, and whether it is possible to achieve equal rights without economic liberalization, should be a matter of debate, but this debate has yet to take place. -- Yoshie