Leisure Time
Women
African American
Home Life
Economy
Business Owners
African Americans
Role of Government
Summary
The 1920's was a great time for many people. New opportunities were available for everyone. New traditions were created. Many groups of people were benefited. The most benefited group was the African Americans. But, in the 1930's everything went down. Everybody lost their money. The presidents weren't good until FDR came along. Millions of people wanted to buy stocks but, when the Great Depression came along everyone wanted to sell their stocks and the stock market crashed. Some major differences from the 1920's to the 1930's are in home life, leisure time, economy, and role of government. Women and business owners took the biggest hits. In the 1920's, significant changes for women took place in politics, the home, the workplace, and in education. Some were the results of laws passed, many resulted from newly developed technologies, and all had to do with changing attitudes toward the place of women in society. In the 1930's women were tasked with feeding and caring for the family on increasingly tiny budgets. In the 1920's , New business and production methods allowed manufacturers to make large profits which they put back into new factories and wage rises. But in the 1930's, unregulated stock practices and fraud drove stock prices far higher than the real worth of American corporations. Production increases in industry were not matched by higher wages. During World War I, farmers worked hard to produce record crops and livestock. When prices fell they tried to produce even more to pay their debts, taxes and living expenses. In the early 1930s prices dropped so low that many farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms. Farmers struggled with low prices all through the 1920s, but after 1929 things began to be hard for city workers as well. After the stock market crash, many businesses started to close or to lay off workers. Many families did not have money to buy things, and consumer demand for manufactured goods fell off. This is how everything went downhill.