What was life like in the early 1900's?

Cars were new, but streets were still clogged with carriages and travel was still difficult. Many people were uneducated and had no electricity, bathrooms, or other comforts we use now. Children could still be used for labor, though interest groups were working on making that against the law. Factory jobs allowed women to live independently in big cities, but they would work from before sunrise until after sundown in stuffy rooms, often working with dangerous machinery or toxic chemicals.

Big city governments were known to be corrupt and use mob like methods to get people to vote for them or remain silent about something. The U.S Mexican War in 1898 had prompted a lot of xenophobic attitudes against Spanish and Mexican people, and Italians, Portuguese, and Eastern European were not considered to be white like Anglo Saxons. The Wild West still existed, though it was not as wild as legends purported it to be. Wired telephones were a new invention, and telegraph messages were still widely used.

Women were marching for the right to vote, and a lot of society was horrified by that prospect. They spread rumors about the women being horrible she-devils who wanted to break up families, and were probably lesbians, because a "good girl" would want to share the same political opinions as her husband. Upper class families had servants. Laundry was a major chore that took up the whole day. People wrote with ink bottles and nib pens, and penmanship was an important lesson in schools. Cold air was said to be good for children, and tenants in apartments would rig baby cages out their windows so their children could get a good airing. Tuberculosis was a major disease, as was polio, influenza, measles, mumps, dysentery, whooping cough, and rubella.

Great

People were smarter than you are.

Depends in which part of the world you lived, on your gender, on your family and on your wealth, power and income.

Where and for whom?

Go to TNT and watch an episode of The Alienist.

Awesome. I was a teen. Loved it. No facebook or anything like that. Awesome.

How would I know? I wasn't around then.