Sociological Imagination- differences between our generation and our granparent's

Different Times, Different Lives

"The ability to grasp the relationship between our lives as individuals and the larger social forces that help to shape them," (Pg 6, Applebaum) is the idea of the sociological imagination, a term made popular by sociologist C. Wright Mills. Whether society knows it or not, our lives aren't always shaped by our own thoughts and emotions. We don't have total control of our destinies. During the twentieth century the world changed significantly through the Industrial Revolution, war, and The Great Depression. We recovered and several decades later the technology boomed. Lives were radically changed by societies changing face. Today children grow up in a very different world than their mothers and fathers did, and there is a dramatic difference between the world of the grandparents and my generation.

Times were different in the 1930's. These were the childhood years of my grandmother. It was The Depression.

This image was selected as a picture of the week o...

Matti

Grandparents

Her family didn't have money, though luckily her father did have a job. The family consisted of my great grandparents and their two young daughters. Naida, the younger of the two, is my grandmother. They lived in Brooklyn, New York, among close relatives. My grandmother did not move around the city very much. She lived in the same house for many years. World War II started and once again things were tough. Years past and my grandmother met my grandfather. They married in 1947 and continued to live in New York, where they resided close to both sides of the family. My grandmother graduated college with a degree in sociology; with hopes to become a social worker. But through the persuasion of her husband and parents she became a schoolteacher. The slums of New York were no place for her to work. Earlier during this century people's...