5 Everyday Things That Were Totally Different in the 1880s

 

When writing historical western romance, I often find myself pausing mid-sentence to ask, “Wait, did they have that yet?”The answer is sometimes a surprising yes—and often a hilarious no. Life in the 1880s looked familiar in some ways, but when you dig into the details, the everyday was anything but ordinary. Here are five things we take for granted today that were very different back then.

1. Getting Dressed Took Time... and Help
Layered petticoats, corsets, drawers, bustles, and skirts meant dressing wasn't something you did in five minutes. And forget zippers. Buttons and hooks ruled the day. For upper-class women, a maid was almost essential just to wrangle the outfit together.

2. Lighting a Room Meant Striking a Match

Electricity was rare outside major cities. Most homes relied on oillamps or candles. Lighting your parlor wasn’t as simple as flipping a switch, it was more like a tiny fire hazard every night.

3. Communication Was Slow—but Full of HeartLetters were the backbone of connection, especially in the wide, rural stretches of the American West. Waiting for the post could take weeks, and yet those handwritten words often carried more love and meaning than a hundred modern texts.

4. Grocery Shopping? Try Chopping Wood

There were no supermarkets stocked with pre-packaged goods. Most families grew, traded, or made their food from scratch. If you wanted bread, you baked it. If you wanted stew, you built a fire and got chopping vegetables, not just wood.

5. Bathing Was... an Occasion. So was doing laundry!
Forget daily showers. Water had to be hauled, heated, and poured into a tin tub—so baths were often weekly events (or longer in winter). You made it count, and usually the whole family shared the water. First come, cleanest served.

Doing the laundry in the 1880s was a full-body workout. Clothes were scrubbed by hand using washboards, boiled in tubs over a fire, then wrung out and hung to dry, rain or shine. Soap was often homemade, and there were no spin cycles or gentle settings. Just grit, elbow grease, and maybe a few blisters.

Living in the 1880s required resourcefulness, patience, and no small amount of grit. It’s part of what makes writing (and reading!) about that era so much fun. Every romantic gesture, every shared meal, every letter carried by hand, it all mattered just a little more.

Until Next Time,

Kit Morgan