Life in the early 1900's

A blog challenge from a dear friend, Bambi. I will deviate from my normal blogging about the craziness that is my life to talk about something serious. That is life about 100 years ago, though I'm focusing on life in the US, especially NYC since it was by far the most populated city at the time. Most of the data I have is from 1900-1915, so it's approximate. We really do have it easy these days, comparatively speaking.

Medicine


Medicine and medical technology changed rapidly during the early 20th century. Advances made during the Civil War improved medicine for the rest of the country, though it was still difficult to get treatment for the poor. One common and easy to procure treatment from all types of pain was alcohol. It was used to treat the pain from anything from a broken bone to a toothache! Quackery was common, and it was normal to see salesmen on the corners of streets selling their wares to people passing by.

The three leading causes of death were pneumonia, tuberculosis (TB), and diarrhea with enteritis, which put simply, is the runs with your small intestine becoming inflamed. Out of 100,000 people, 146 died of TB. Comparatively, in the Americas, out of 100,000 people, approx 2 people a year die of TB in the Americas, excluding those infected with TB (source: WHO TB Factsheet). The deaths from disease were likely caused by overcrowding in apartments, called tenements, due to the massive population shift from country to city in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Additionally, the CDC states the according to serological testing preformed in NYC in 1901, anywhere between 5-19% of men had syphilis! Many women at that time turned to prostitution to supplement their income from factory work.

In the early 1900's, the maternal mortality rate was approximately 65% higher than it is today, and not much lower than it was in the mid 1800's. Over 90% of births took place at home.  While strides had been taken to improve sanitation, approximately 20% of women died from sepsis (source: CDC). 165 out of 1000 infants died in the first year of life, though we do not have exact statistics of how long those children survived within that first year (or, rather, I can't find a source. If you can find one, let me know!). To give you an idea of how horrible that is, these days, the rate is 7 per 100 live births. That statistic may or may not include accidents or violent deaths, I'm not sure. Their life expectancy was just 47 years old. I'm 26, so I'd be more than half dead. Today, it's 76, at least.

Working Conditions

Wouldn't you want your 6-9 year old doing this?

To put it bluntly, working conditions in the early 1900's sucked. They worked long, back breaking hours. The national average for manufacturing jobs was to work 6 day weeks, 15 hour jobs. This also included working in the fields. One half of all work related deaths occurred in 2 industries, coal mining and railroading. By 1979, this rate fell by 97%. Women and children were not excluded from this work. They earned one to two dollars a day in factories or mines. I'm having trouble finding more info on their working conditions, likely because anyone caught speaking out about how it was working in a place would be fired, so I'm going to add in some pictures. You can clearly see the working conditions were not fun.

Workers on a farm sort vegetables

Picking beets

Add caption

Daily life

Again, I'm mainly focusing on city life as that's where the bulk of people lived. Unless you were well off, you likely lived in one of these.

Doesn't this look fun!?!

Tenement life was hard. The walls were thin, you were lucky to have heat, and chances were good you had rats and mice joining you in bed. The average family had 8-10 children. I can't imagine having 8-10 kids in one of these, could you?  Wealthy children attended private academies.  The schools were houses with a few rooms in them set aside for classrooms.  They were small, with only about three or four in each grade. One teacher taught several grades in just one room.  In the private schools, girls and boys were not together. They went to separate academies. Public schools, on the other hand, were free. Boys and girls were at the same school. There was a class for each grade level with about 20 to 30 in each class. Many children did not have the ability to go to school at all, as they were needed to work to help support their families. School was, by law, required until the age of 16 but this was not enforced. Girls rarely went to college, instead marrying young. Most poor children finished school at 8th grade, and went on to help their families at work.

As you can clearly tell, life has changed in 100 years. Vaccinations, sanitation, and safer working conditions have meshed to make our lives just a little safer. We know now that there are serious risks to childbirth and take measures to mitigate those risks. We wear seatbelts in the car, eat healthier food, and don't work those long backbreaking hours, for the most part. Is life better now? I think so.