Edith Wharton lived and wrote during a time of change and turmoil in America. She was among the group of American intellectual ex-patriots who fled to Paris in the early 1900s. Throughout her fiction, most of which is set in New York City in the early 1900s, her characters deal with many of the issues of the day including social classes and status, wealth and power, women's rights, progressivism, contraception and abortion, child labor, and education, worker's rights, and many others. Edith Wharton's Old New York Society is a comparative analysis of Wharton's Progressive era fiction.