Everyday Life in the 1800s by Marc McCutcheon

Mary Walker to Calamity Jane, who defied convention and got away with it. Nor does he give any space to the many eccentrics and rebels, from Dr. He doesn't point out that women's rights were a focus of much attention through much of the century and their status did improve, especially after about 1845. work was never done.,' but fails to add that household help was cheap and abundant, and even 'mechanics' (what we would call skilled workers) earning less than a dollar a day could afford at least a maid-of-all-work also that the housewife was generally assisted by a resident aunt, mother or mother-in-law, unmarried sister, older daughter, or some combination, as well as neighbors. He states that 'The nineteenth-century home was a woman's.confines.

Author McCutcheon does occasionally neglect to give facts that would soften some of the gloomy picture he paints.

Though not by any means an in-depth treatment of the period-no one book could ever cover all the fascinating details of everyday life and society in a hundred crowded years-it did provide me with an assortment of vernacular terms I'd never seen before, a sidebar on stagecoach etiquette, another on the treatment of various common contagions, some information on how safecrackers cracked safes, a good chronology of popular magazines, and various other tidbits to add to my ever-expanding files of information. I've been researching the 19th Century (with specific attention to the Old West, but a lot of Eastern culture got transplanted there, so inevitably I've had to learn about that too) for 35 years now, and I still find that a book can occasionally give me some information I didn't have.

Everyday Life in the 1800s by Marc McCutcheon