Social Classes

These photos illustrate the contrasting worlds of social classes produced by early capitalism. The photo on the left was taken in 1911 at a canning factory in Port Royal, South Carolina. The two girls on the left are 6 years old; the one on the right is 10. They worked full time shucking oysters and did not go to school. The photo on the right was taken in the late 1800s. The children on the right, Cornelius and Gladys Vanderbilt, are shown in front of their parents’ estate. They went to school and did not work. You can see how the social locations illustrated in these photos would have produced different orientations to life and, therefore, politics, ideas about marriage, values, and so on—the stuff of which life is made.