ABSTRACT
A few years ago, when the British Institute of Public Opinion asked a random sample of grown-up persons of both sexes to what social class they considered themselves to belong, rather less than half of those who answered said that they belonged to the working class. The Census gives no social classification of the unoccupied or the retired. In the Census of 1951 an attempt has been made to present a more realistic picture. No parallel classification is given for occupied females, because of the difficulty of assigning a social class to unmarried women workers, many of whom work in gainful occupations only for a few years before getting married. The plain truth is that the social structure of Great Britain and of other developed industrial countries is much too complicated for easy breaking up into stratified social classes.
