Simple life like the 1800s

I would like to live the simple life like the 1800s.

This is a comment that is told to us by numerous people at expos we attend. So let’s take a look at what life was like in the 1800s. Was it really simple?

So you’re ready to start out by building your own home, digging your own well, blacksmithing for yourself? You’re ready to starve in the winter when you’ve had a bad crop year? You ladies are expected to have 18 to 20 children all born at home and half of them die before the age of five because of dysentery, typhoid, scarlet fever, measles and other natural occurrences.

People took baths MAYBE once a week, and some people relied only on “hip baths” (basically washing from a bucket). When they did bathe, soap wasn’t really used, so it was just water and a rag for the vast majority of the stinky population. Also, there was no shampoo or deodorant, so body odor was just an assumed thing. Though some people tried to hide their stank with perfumes and flower petals under the arms, it wasn’t all too effective. Oh, and let us also remember that tooth brushing (let alone toothpaste and mouthwash) was not a thing, so bad breath was basically the norm.

To the City!
First of all, let’s talk poop: those little attachments to catch the poop on today’s wagons did not exist. That resulted in poop from horses littering the streets pretty much everywhere you went. Aside from the poop, another fun fact they don’t tend to discuss about horse travel is that they sometimes died. Like, just keeled over and died in the middle of the street. And because horses are so big, there was no quick or easy way to get them out of the street. This meant that people would often just leave the dead horse where it fell, where it would rot, bloat, and sometimes explode because of the build-up of gasses in its abdomen. COOL!

The average city dweller has a whole lot of complaints when it comes to urban living. It’s was hot in the summer, (no AC) and smelly, too, and everything was REALLY crowded. Life in the tenements, for instance, where people would go when they first got to this country and where 2.3 million people – or, ⅔ of all New Yorker’s lived by the end of the century, was absolutely squalid. They live PACKED IN, like multiple families to a single room apartment cramped, had no indoor plumbing or heat, and were poorly lit (if lit at all.) Plus, there was often no ventilation, which meant that when one person got sick, everybody got sick. Still sounds fun right?

Back the country!
Their work day started before the sun came up and boys’ tasks might include cutting, splitting, or carrying firewood for the stove or fireplace, tending to the farm animals, carrying water to the house, putting up or repairing fencing, working in the gardens, fields or orchards, and hunting, trapping or fishing to provide food for the family. Girls spent long days cooking, milking cows or goats, collecting eggs, churning butter, making breads and cheeses, preserving foods, cleaning, doing laundry, making candles, sewing clothes for the family, preparing fibers like wool and flax to spin and weave, caring for younger brothers and sisters and helping elderly family members. Oh, the joy of country life!

SO…..
As a whole life expectancy for men was about 40 years and 42 years for women. Causes of death include disease like cholera, smallpox, and tuberculosis, as well as poor diet, ridiculous bad medical care, accidents, urban squalor, and generally being super stressed out over life.

Women were basically the property of men, be it their fathers or their husbands. They had no real options except to have kids – and to keep having kids – and many had to maintain both a household and a job at a factory. Women were expected to be submissive, and the fashion of the day did a good job as being as constricting as possible, between huge hoop skirts and corsets so tight they would constrict breathing and warp the ribs. If you stepped out of line, your husband had every right to put you “in your place”. Women had very minimal access to education, not allowed to vote, so weren’t even really considered full citizens. Oh, and if they thought you were too interested in sex, they could diagnose you as a hysteric and remove your uterus. THAT does not sound like fun.

Medicine, or lack of
Medicine was really quite a horror show all throughout this century. This included the understanding of infectious disease, which, as you may have guessed, wasn’t all too great back then. Nobody knew what germs were, never mind how they spread, and basically just had to kinda throw their hands up when they got sick. Even if they did find out that diseases were caused by germs, there were no antibiotics to treat them with – those only came around later on.

We’re talking cholera (a disease where you basically poop yourself to death), smallpox (think chickenpox but terrifyingly deadly/disfiguring), yellow fever (a disease you get via mosquito bite where you literally bleed out of your eyes and mouth), syphilis (which LITERALLY EATS YOUR FACE OFF AND BORES HOLES IN YOUR BRAIN) – you name it. Good times, good times.

So yeah, let’s go back to the way things used to be. It sounds like a simpler, better time (insert evil grin here). There’s a lot of things we didn’t touch on in this post. But you get the general idea, I like our modern society. It may not be the greatest at times, but to me, it seems better than the way things used to be.