Social Class In Brave New World

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Many important issues defined the 1920s. These problems inspired Aldous Huxley to write Brave New World as a warning about the possible consequences of current society’s course. Could society still be hurtling toward the dangerous future Huxley foresaw? It is believed that things are incredibly different now, but how far from Brave New World has society progressed? Several of the problems of the 1920s, such as social and economic class, marriage and the nuclear family, and women’s roles, still influence society today. In the 1920s a growing financial and cultural divide separated the population into social and economic classes. In 1928, the top one percent earned twenty-three point-nine percent of income and the bottom ninety percent earned Class can influence extremely important aspects, like what school a person will go to and what their future career may be, and seemingly unimportant aspects, like where they buy their clothes and where they eat (DeAngelis). This is because of an increasingly widening financial gap where the upper class earns anywhere from millions to billions each year, the middle class earns between $46,000 and a million dollars, and the lower class earns less than $45,000 a year (“Class). Another important aspect of day to day life, homelife in the early 1920s was very traditional. The typical followed the pattern of the traditional nuclear family, which is “a social unit composed of two parents and one or more children” (“Nuclear”); however, some people did live in alternative situations. Despite this traditional family set up, divorce was on the rise, and in 1928, the divorce rate was at sixteen point-six percent (Drowne and Huber During the war, women filled the jobs left by men in the military, and many women chose to continue working after the war’s end, which led to a twenty-five percent increase in the number of working women (“Changing”). Consequently, because the majority of women were married, married women began to dominate the workforce, where previously it was dominated by single women (“Changing”) (Goldin 82). Workplace and societal role changes continue to progress today. Currently, about seventy-four percent of women ages twenty-five through fifty-four are active in the workforce (Kurtz). Therefore, more women are working full time, causing children to have no stay at home parent or for the father to take over the mother’s traditional role. In 2012 there were 2 million stay at home dads, nearly doubling from the 1.1 million in 1989 (Livingston). Many of the paramount issues of the 1920s are still relevant today. While some issues, such as the nuclear family, have diminished in importance, others, such as economic class, remain a defining problem. It seems as though society is not as far from Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons as one might think. Only time will tell whether these issues will continue to influence society or vanish from

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