I had two great grandmothers that lost the majority of their children as babies/toddlers.
I think a lot of people are not accounting for the costs of risks during that time. If everything went well, the rain was on time, no other nations attacked, no one fell ill, there were no birthing complications, then life was okay. But nature usually throws a few curveballs.
The sole question is can you on 100 dollars a month today live in a manner similar to what the average person in the 20s did
The empirical questions are what does 100 a month buy you today and what was the average lifestyle of a person in the 20s in terms of how much would it cost to buy that lifestyle today
Questions of how we got feminnism and better medicine since then is irrelevant and trying to distort a simple empirical analysis into a political one
The resource cost and availability that existed in 1920 were because of non-empirical decisions like politics and societies adaptations to new technologies. It's like you're taking a still frame of an avalanche and looking for a flat spot to build a foundation.