From a historical Perspective
When you read the news today, you hear about how bad life is and how much is wrong with our society. But looking at the issues being brought up from a historical perspective, we might have a better appreciation of what we have.
Let’s start by painting a picture of life 100-120 years ago. So many things have happened that have allowed for the changes we see today. The 20th century saw the first airplane flight as well as the first man on the moon. Radio, TV and internet all came during the century. Yet many today feel those changes are not near enough.
The 1920 census was the first time that 50% of the population was urban rather than rural. At that time, cities with a population of 2500 were considered to be urban. In 2010, 81% of the population was considered to be urban, with urban being defined as living in a city with population of 50,000 people or more. So we have become much more urban than we were 100 years ago. We have gone from a farming economy to a manufacturing economy to a service economy.
Radio was just coming into popular use in the early 1920s. Movies were also a new feature. Before that, news was very much local. Local newspapers were the main way to get information. There was no National News agencies, no 24 hour as it happens news service. Media campaigns, what ones there were, were localized. We are exposed to much more news and media than our grandparents were. We are also bombarded with advertising everywhere we turn.
Life expectancy in the early 1920s was 51 years. There was no compulsory education. In fact the majority of 14-18 year old males were working rather than sitting in school. 85% of males over 14 were in the workforce. The new urban jobs were more dangerous, approximately 30 times the work related injury rate as we have today. And the average salary of workers was three dollars a week. Women were starting to go to work more, but were still only a small percentage of the work force. Women had also just received the right to vote. The road to women’s equality was just starting to be built. It was little more than a hard dirt path, much like many of the actual roads in those days.
Cars were just coming into use, as were other things such as tractors. Only about 10 percent of the population had access to cars. And at the time, cars had a top speed of 40-50 mph. And that was in the cities where paved roads were becoming commonly available. Farms were slowly moving from manual or animal based techniques to having tractors to cultivate, a trend that would cut the manual labor needed to farm an acre dramatically, and reduce the reliance on large labor forces in the farming field.
Society was truly racist at this time. Segregation was both legal and normal. The KKK was flourishing and events such as the Tulsa massacre were obvious evidence of the racial divide that was well entrenched in society. We have come a long way since then.
Things that did not exist 100 years ago have changed society a lot. Daycare and the equivalent use of schooling as daycare reduced the need for mothers to be at home. A transition of jobs from dangerous manufacturing to information technology made work easier and safer. Farm work, which used to involve heavy manual labor, now relies on machines, making life easier for farmers. Manufacturing allowed for purchasing of premade goods, rather than families having to make their own candles, clothes, tools. All of these changes came together to allow women the freedom to be married and have a career.
Medicine has also been a major factor in changing life over the last 100 years. Childbirth was almost always at home 100 years ago, and death rates for mothers and children were much higher than today. Medicine has allowed for more people to grow up stronger. Medicine, along with less physically taxing work and secure retirement have allowed people to live longer, and allowed many to live that would be too weak to survive in the environment of the 1920s. Birth control has allowed sex with less risk of pregnancy, removing some of the stigma of sexual relations outside of marriage.
In the last 3 generations, we have gone from a society where women had a defined role in society, to one where women can define their role in society. We have gone from a society where segregation is legal and encouraged, to one where we have had an African American for a President. We have gone from sex being associated with marriage and childbirth, with stigma for extramarital sex because of the real problems it caused for the woman, the children and society, to one where sex is associated with recreation, and having a child out of wedlock is no big deal. We have gone from long days of hard manual labor, with no concept of retirement, to shorter days of more mental labor, with most of us looking at 2 decades of retirement, at least. We have gone from travel to the next state being a long journey, to travel anywhere in the world being at our fingertips.
No, life in this country, or any country for that matter, is not perfect. But there has been a lot of improvement over the last three generations. My mom grew up in a completely different world than my kids. And while a lot of the changes have definitely been for the better, I am not sure that all of them have been good. It seems to me that my kids generation have a lot more problems than my generation or my parents generation did. Maybe we just hear about the problems more. But that is also part of the problem that I see today. I see an impatience with anything but rapid change. And I am afraid that impatience is going to backfire and send us to a place where things are getting worse, not better. My kids generation will likely be the first in a long time not to end up better off than their parents. And I wonder what that holds for the generation to follow.