20 Unusual Things From The Past That Were Normal

Human beings are an ever-evolving species. Once, we carried spears and created fantastic works of art on the walls of French caves. Today, we carry smartphones and trip over things because we don't ever look where we're going. Yes, the human species gets better and better all the time.

Since the Industrial Revolution, things have changed at such a blindingly fast pace that we sometimes forget just how weird the world used to be. (Because it's not at all weird anymore, right?) Things that were once commonplace seem strange or even bizarre today, although it's probably also true that humans who lived 100 years ago would think the things we do are pretty strange and bizarre. Sadly, we don't have any way to actually show an early 20th-century person a YouTube video of someone eating a Tide Pod. But we can at least enjoy our own bemusement at the strange and bizarre habits of our recent ancestors, mostly because it's okay to make fun of people who have been dead for decades.

WHEN UGLY WAS ILLEGAL

This sounds like the plot of post-apocalyptic fiction but sadly, it's actually pre-apocalyptic non-fiction. One hundred years ago, in many big cities in the United States, it was illegal to be ugly.

Let's take Chicago as an example.According to the Chicago Tribune, in 1881, Alderman James Peevey decided he'd had enough of the eyeball-assaulting horrors of other people's misfortune, so he introduced an ordinance to ban people who were "diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object" from the streets of Chicago, where they might make people uncomfortable. If you were considered too ugly to be in public, you had to pay a fine of $1 to $50 (which was a decent sum in those days) or go to the poorhouse, which was kind of like an insane asylum for poor people.

After World War I, when veterans returned home with missing limbs and other disfiguring battle scars, public opinion toward the disabled began to change, but ugly laws remained on the books and their enforcement continued up until the 1950s. Chicago's ugly law wasn't officially dropped until 1974.

Now we'd love to say we're way more enlightened today but fat-shaming is still a thing, so collective enlightenment is perhaps still forthcoming. But at least fat-shaming isn't written into law.

IT WAS A HARD KNOCK LIFE

What would literature be without the lowly orphan, consigned to a sad life of scrubbing floors with toothbrushes and sharing a bedroom with 25 similarly unfortunate children, only to be occasionally saved by kindly millionaires and giants who are bad at pronouncing things? Orphanages are ubiquitous in children's stories, but they aren't really a thing anymore, at least not in the Little Orphan Annie sense of the word.

The first American orphanage was established in 1729, after a massacre took out most of the adults in a Mississippi settlement. Before that, kids who lost their parents went to live with relatives, were apprenticed to tradesmen, or ended up begging on city streets. According to Virginia Commonwealth University, the American practice of stuffing children into orphanages (even though many of them weren't even orphans, but the children of poor, single mothers) didn't really start to come into question until the 1920s, when most states implemented "mother's pensions." That gave poor mothers the financial ability to care for their own children rather than placing them in institutionalized care. Orphanages started to phase out in the early 20th century, although they do still exist in another form — orphans today are sometimes put in group homes when there aren't enough foster families to take them in. You won't find kids dressed in rags with shaved heads scrubbing the floors with toothbrushes in any of these modern facilities, though, and probably not too many kindly millionaires, either.