Ah yes, 100 years ago -- the good old days
At the turn of the century, three quarters of the states forbade married women to have property in their own name. In these states a woman's property became her husband's upon marriage. In a third of the states, a woman's earnings belonged to her husband. And in all states except Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho, women were not allowed to vote. Frontiers were less conservative on the woman's suffrage issue than the older, metropolitan areas -- similar to Australia being ahead of England on this issue. Women active in the suffrage movement were described as neurotic, as suffering from an urge to imitate men, as hysterical or as homosexuals. It was argued that with their big sleeves, women would be able to hide numerous ballots and vote more than once.
At the turn of the century, the average workweek was twelve hours a day and six days a week. Coal miners were suffering and dying in appallingly large numbers from both accidents and effects of the environment in which they worked. Poor and immigrant children often worked alongside their parents, kids as young as seven or eight working twelve hours a day -- for low wages that poor families needed mainly for food.
By 1900 half the states had some sort of restrictions on child labor, such as a law that children work no more than ten hours a day. But only about ten states made a serious effort to enforce such laws. For factory owners, children were a cheap supply of labor, and employers preferred children for many jobs because their fingers were quick and nimble and because the children's small size enabled them to tend machines in cramped spaces. By 1900, 1.7 million kids under sixteen were employed in cotton mills in New England and in the South, and children were still working in West Virginia's coal mines. The view prevailed among some devout Christians that all this was good for the children in that idle hands were the devil's tools. Some others claimed that children should be in school rather than working, and they were criticized for being unrealistic and utopian.
A lot of child labor was on farms, including tenant farming, where sharecroppers were turning as much as half of their crops over to the owners of the property they worked. The debts of tenant farmers often matched or exceeded the income from their share of the crops they grew. They were paying higher prices for the goods they were buying at country stores, usually on credit, and they were often cheated. Their houses were run down, some with a view of the stars through the roof or the land under the floor boards. It was widely believed that it was the responsibility of these people to raise themselves up through hard work. And a few did and became examples referred to in arguing its possibility.
At the turn of the century, typhus was prevalent, and tuberculosis was rampant. Statistics claimed that the United States had 194 cases of tuberculosis for every 100,000 persons, the disease appearing mostly in areas that were crowded and lacking hygiene, such as tenement buildings that lacked indoor bathrooms and where refuse was allowed to pile up in streets and pollute drinking water. Syphilis was also widespread at the turn of the century. Mental institutions were filled with patients whose illnesses were late-state syphilitic infections, syphilis in its late stage attacking the brain.
Infant deaths and the deaths of women giving birth were high compared to later in the century. Most births took place in a woman's home, but hospital deliveries were on the rise, where better equipment was available for emergencies. In hospitals anesthetics were used in place of the more painful natural childbirth, while resistance remained among Christians who quoted scripture that "in pain though shalt bear children."
White immigrant labor also fought for improvements -- against the belief among businessmen that wages should be determined by the market place. Employers believed that they should be free to pay their workers as little as possible -- in other words, according to market forces. There was no minimum wage law, nor laws that prevented poor working conditions. And with the cost of labor determined partly by the supply of workers, employers had been skewing down the market price for labor by importing large numbers of immigrants.
Government funding of medical research was almost non-existent, and most medical research was being funded by wealthy philanthropists, such as John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, who established the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and donated millions of dollars for research on tuberculosis.
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Topic: This is too true to be funny. (Read 364 times)