Time-travel back to 1900: How weird would I seem to them?

[Doug_Bowe]

If you smoked it would probably be a cigar. Cigarettes would be available, of course, but they really didn’t gain in popularity until WWI.

As far as being vegetarian…hey, if you went to the Kellogg Sanitarium in Battle Creek you’d automatically become a vegetarian. John Kellogg invented corn flakes to replace breakfasts that included sausages and bacon. His brother W. K. would cash in on the idea by mass producing it. So the idea of being a vegetarian isn’t too far fetched. In the case of the Kellogg family it came with their religion.

If you need a shave you might want to have it done at a barber shop. The safety razor wouldn’t be invented by W. K Gillette for another 3 years and you might do damage to yourself with a straight razor.

As far as race relations are concened that will probably depend on your geography. Are you in the Deep South?
Let’s not short-sell what went on between the races back then. It may have been just a little over 100 years ago but take a look at “Birth of a Nation” as one window of that era (1915). The NAACP would be founded in 1909 and outside their headquarters they’d fly a black flag each day there was a lynching.

[plnnr]

My grandmother was born in 1901. I asked her what it was like when she was a child (not 1900, but not too far off). The following (from memory) relates to a small city in VA (Fredericksburg, to be exact)

There were a few cars, but not many. Mainly horse drawn wagons and related modes of transport. People walked if they needed to get somewhere. Trains ran regularly, but it was pretty rare to travel. By and large the world was made up of where you go get to and back home in a day.

Surprisingly, the racism was much less overt than you might expect. The races worked together (my grandmother came from a working class background), were on friendly terms, and there was generally a live and let live attitude (and this was VA in the early 1900s). Churches were, and still are, the most segregated places. Not much socializing but friendly enough interactions. Violence toward blacks was rare, but it happened. As an aside, I can tell you that my grandfather, who’s mother died in 1896 when he was 4 years old, was taken in a raised by a neighboring African American family. They were all tenant farmers on a dairy so everyone just helped each other out - if you’re all poor as dirt race doesn’t come in to play much.

Medicine was made up of patent stuff (big doses or alcohol or laudnum) or home remedies. Most women knew some rudamentary home remedies. Surgery wasn’t common, but could be used in emergencies.

People worked very, very hard just to survive. There was no Social Security or pensions (except in the rarest instances - I believe her mother collected a Confederate widow’s pension of a couple bucks a month). Prices were much, much different. The rent for the home she lived in was $15 a month. Vegetables were grown in the back garden and put up for winter.

Cigarettes were not really widespread. They were originally intended to be smoked by women (men smoked cigars, pipes, or chewed tobacco and dipped snuff), but she didn’t remember many women doing so.

School was available, but attendance was not compulsory when she was a child (or at least she didn’t attend past 3rd grade - like many children she went to work).

People were outside much, much more than today. There was no AC, no TV or radio and there wasn’t much reason to be in the house if the chores were done.

Death wasn’t removed from everday experience like it is today. People didn’t die in the hospital - they died at home. Lots of children died and it was pretty regular for women to have children about every two years.

I think that touches on most of the issues raised above. It was a much slower pass of life, and hard work was a way of life. If you could adjust to that sort of lifestyle, you’d fit in pretty quickly.

[Quartz]

@elmwood

Some social norms of the day would be shocking to us. Children drinking alcohol (no drinking age, and some brands of beer advertised as “for the entire family”, “ideal for nursing mothers”, and so on),

Given that the water was likely unsafe to drink this was actually a good thing. And the alcohol concentrations were much lower than today.

[Chronos]

As to the OP, another aspect, not yet mentioned: environmentalism. The what? Hunting animals on industrial scale cause loss of biodiversity? Massive cutting of forest cause soil depletion and contribute to floods? Heating houses cause climate change??? What language are you speaking, actually?

There might not have been a sense of the environment, biodiversity, etc. being valuable in their own right, but there was certainly a sense of conserving resources for use by humans. Remember, this was the time of Teddy Roosevelt. And the writings of James Fenimore Cooper, several decades previous, already included the idea of conservation in places: It’s bad to be wasteful of game animals, renewable energy sources are preferred over non-renewable, etc. (admittedly, Cooper’s characters had a rather different sense than we do of what constitutes “renewable”).

Many ideas that we now consider “enlightened” might have been rarer then, but most of them were present.

[Xema]

@Mr Buttons

You’d better study up on racism too, if you were nice to any colored back then you’d probably be lynched within a week, maybe at least tarred and feathered.

I, too, find this to be a very strange statement. For one example, consider that the Wright Brothers were schoolmates of and friends with Paul Laurence Dunbar and actually published some of his early writings (they were into printing & publishing before they got distracted by the flying problem). And they were not social pioneers - this was normal behavior.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

If you are female, you job options are wife/mother, potential wife/mother, teacher, typist telegrapher or whore.

[mlees]

@Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor

If you are female, you job options are wife/mother, potential wife/mother, teacher, typist telegrapher or whore.

There were a lot of women scientists and doctors in the 19th century… they just didn’t get the credit they were due in the some of the publications of the period.

Women in science

[crowmanyclouds]

@Mister Rik

If you go back, whatever you do … don’t forget your hat!

and make sure there aren’t any pennies in the pockets of that suit you think is soo cool!

CMC +fnord!
Reference for the SF impaired.

[AmunRa]

@Derleth

(Oh, and be sure to get a full round of vaccines. Polio, TB, and smallpox especially, and I don’t even know if we can vaccinate against diphtheria, typhoid, and cholera, though we’d better learn if the flooding gets much worse. Taking back multiple rounds of antibiotics would be wise.)

As an aside there are definitely vaccines for diphtheria, typhoid, and cholera. Typhoid/diphtheria are in fact one vaccine and part of the standard set of vaccines you get while serving in the army.

[Martini_Enfield]

You’d have to watch out for making references to places that don’t exist yet (Saudi Arabia), being surprised at places that do exist (The Ottoman Empire), and, if you’re from anywhere except the US or UK, explaining why you keep using the Metric System to refer to distances, weights, and measures.

Personally, I reckon I’d be OK. I’d get a job working as a journalist for a respectable newspaper or magazine, and write my perceived eccentricities off to having gotten too much sun in Africa/Australia/India/The Pacific/somewhere equally exotic.

[Orual]

@Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor

If you are female, you job options are wife/mother, potential wife/mother, teacher, typist telegrapher or whore.

Plenty of women worked in factories and sweatshops.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@ralph124c

Chronic pain? jus take belt of that lydia pinkham’s Nerve Tonic (10% opium in alcohol)! One thing: you would have to get used to the stench-all those horses dropped a lot of manure everyday-what did cities DO with the stuff?

Are you sure? Everyone seems to believe that Lydia Pinkham’s contained some narcotic–but as far as I could learn from briefly researching online, it never contained anything more dangerous than herbal extracts, some of which are still used by some women today to ease the discomfort of monthly periods.

I think this may be just one of those historic urban legends. I’ve also heard people who believe that Coca-Cola contained cocaine as late as the 1930s, and that Southern ladies would have to get their fix at the soda fountain, but of course this isn’t true, and probably stemmed from the fact that “dope” continued to be a slang term for Coca-Cola long after they had stopped putting in cocaine.

Though certainly powerful drugs were much easier to get. Someone opened a thread here just the other day bemoaning the fact that all we’re allowed to have these days without a script is just marginally effective.

[Saratoga_Sam]

@Completely

I was wondering how “odd” someone from our time would seem to people in the year 1900? What would stand out the most? Lack of believing in their superstitions? Understanding/knowing where diseases like salmonella come from? Dramatic differences in hygeine? Trying to think of others…

Aside from trivial matters of dress and deportment, and the liklihood that if you’re an average American from 2008 you’ll seem a bit taller and way overweight, how people react to you would probably be the same way they react to you now. That is, if you’re a shy bookish nerd in the 21st Century, folks in 1900 will soon form the same opinion. OTOH, if you’re a charismatic charmer today, you’ll probably soon have the same effect on the locals back then, once you pick up the social cues of the day. When interacting with people, personality trumps whatever toys you may happen to be carrying in your pockets.

[Typo_Knig]

Going back to 1900 is so 1999

Web sites for The 1900 House:

PBS

Wiki

IMDB

Amazon

I thought it was a very interesting series. The family had a lot of trouble with the mechanics of 1900 home technology at first: running the stove and water heater, figuring out how to do laundry. Our ancestors would not have had those problems. Strict social roles were more of a problem for the 1999 family, particularly for the teen aged daughter.

The Mom, who was the most keen to go on the “time travel” show, was the one who had to most work to do in 1900. She looked very happy to run her washing machine when she was back in her 1999 house.

I really enjoyed the “time travel” documentaries. I hesitate to call them reality shows because, these are real. Personally, I would have a hard enough time going back to 1998 or 1988 technology - I would not want to go back to the Nineteen Aughts.

[Derleth]

@Typo Knig

Personally, I would have a hard enough time going back to 1998 or 1988 technology

What’s so hard about going back ten years? Computers weren’t that much slower, the Internet wasn’t that much smaller, and everything else was pretty much the exact same.

[Alex_Dubinsky]

@Derleth

What’s so hard about going back ten years? Computers weren’t that much slower, the Internet wasn’t that much smaller, and everything else was pretty much the exact same.

People are forgetting the dimension to these comparisons that there’s many different kinds of people. I think the well-off people who used soap every morning and lived indoors weren’t so different from us. They had good skin at least. Some of the other comments in this thread are about poorer laborers. But on the flipside these people still exist on U.S. soil. (The modern racists who don’t bathe just don’t visit nerd forums.)

These things work like evolution. It’s not that things get invented, it’s that populations shift.
Btw, nice analogy with the internet. My brother had a 300 baud modem in the late 80s that he used to post on BBS. Ie, the same bs we’re doing right now. But that was a world with a lot fewer people in it.

(Although at the same time things were different, in degree. The internet was smaller and slower and crappier and you’d find a fraction of the answers on altavista than google.)

[Orual]

@Derleth

What’s so hard about going back ten years? Computers weren’t that much slower, the Internet wasn’t that much smaller, and everything else was pretty much the exact same.

No Google, no Wikipedia, no YouTube (was there any streaming video at all?). No MySpace or other networking sites, much fewer blogs.

The internet of 10 years ago was an entirely different country.

[hajario]

@Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor

If you are female, you job options are wife/mother, potential wife/mother, teacher, typist telegrapher or whore.

Also nursing, laundress/cleaning lady/domestic servant.

[Tom_Tildrum]

@Saratoga Sam

That is, if you’re a shy bookish nerd in the 21st Century, folks in 1900 will soon form the same opinion.

Dammit!

Note to self: abandon time-travel plan; resume mind-control experiments.

[Typo_Knig]

@Derleth

What’s so hard about going back ten years? Computers weren’t that much slower, the Internet wasn’t that much smaller, and everything else was pretty much the exact same.

I was pretty much kidding, although the comments about high-speed internet access after your post are right on.

I would also add: allergy meds. My allergies are under much better control than ten years ago, between better meds and surgery. The surgery would have been a bigger hassle, and probably less effective, a decade ago.