Mind-boggling story of my great-granny

[SafeMouse]

I've been looking into my family tree a little bit, and my great granny. My gran (her daughter) is still alive, sharp as a tack and a wonderful character. I saw her Monday evening with my findings.... welll.....

I think I knew great granny had been married twice but that was about it. She'd actually got married at 15 (!) And was married for 9 years before first husband died. 14 months later she married my great grandad. She had no children from her first marriage, and 5 from second (Inc my gran her only girl).

So, I bring this up with gran and she says, all nonchalant 😆 'well she didn't know how' . Apparently she was very 'proper' (higher working class, devoutly religious Victorian family) and never consummated her marriage because she had no idea what sex was. Neither did husband 1 by the sounds of it. She desperately loved and wanted children and didn't know why she wasn't getting pregnant and far too embarrassed to ask anyone.

Husband 1 shuffled off his mortal coil, then I'm guessing she had quite a startling wedding night with husband 2.

My gran knows this as just before her marriage great granny sat her down to have what sounds like a very painful conversation about how babies are made 😆

I just can't stop thinking about the poor woman now. 9 years! What did they do? Had DH1 not tragically died young would she have been a virgin all her life? Would someone (a doctor?) At some point explained sex to her? It's very mind-boggling

My late father and his two sisters were all born within a day of each other on different years exactly 9 months after my grandparents annual trip to Wimbledon .

It was clearly my nans annual lie back and think about England trip!

I think it's really hard to understand the mental lives of people in the past. And to really see how different life has become. Books capture some of it - How Far Can You Go by David Lodge has a series of appalling wedding nights due to lack of knowledge.

I remember huge rows between my sister and my parents when she wanted to live wuth her boyfriend without getting married. That was mid-80s. I well remember that young couples in soap operas explicitly didn't have sex before marriage in the 80s - that's why Scott and Charlene in Neighbours got married so young (I remember her being 16 but I guess 18 was more likely). I also remember a very ordinary couple in the series Angels - both nurses - who took ages to get their sex lives on track and the woman told him she was a virgin just before the wedding. This all seemed perfectly normal.

Yy to female ignorance being prized - not in my family in theory but in practice my mum told me almost nothing. Again my deepest gratitude to Just 17 and the BBC.

I'm 71 and got no sex education at school. And no talk from parents. I remember someone bringing in a booklet in to school they'd been given by their DM - it was about fruitflies reproducing.
I was given a booklet from Woman magazine about periods.
Not sure where I picked up the required info from.

Same with one of my grandmothers. No sex for grandpa for seven years when she finally agreed. ! Poor bugger got married when he was 19. He left her and she never accepted the 'no sex please' had anything to do with it.

A school friend went to Pakistan to get married at 16 - early 2000s
wjen she returned we were all very keen to know about the sex. She told us she wouldn’t be pregnant as the cum had all leaked out of her after the sex. Think baby arrived 9 months later

It’s very possibly husband 1 was homosexual, thus not making any advances for 9 years

I can remember, when I was about 12 or 13, reading my older sister's copy of The Thorn Birds which was really popular at that time

I was truly shocked . . . . Meghan's husband made her take her nightdress off on her wedding night!

When my sister got married, our DM bought her a beautiful nightdress from Laura Ashley, pure white with pintucks and lace, and I remember thinking "What a waste of money . . . "

I just bought that book, thanks for spoiling 🙄

My mother didnt know how babies came out until when pregnant she was told they came out the same way they went in. She thought she'd be cut open until then. Young women were still raised being told that sex was something you did for your husband (lie back and think of England) and not something they were expected to enjoy. This was to discourage sex before marriage. Children sometimes had wierd ideas like believing you could become pregnant if you sat in a seat still warm from a man sitting there or by kissing. You might also have been told that you couldnt get pregnant the first time or if you did it standing up. My mother was keen to provide more accurate information during the teenage years but would regard today's sex education with horror.

Although it was quite common not to talk about sex many rural children would have seen animals having sex and some children would see their pets having sex. They would hastily be hustled away by any adult with them. Children's innocence was seen as something to protect as long as possible. Still for this reason I suspect great granny's story of staying a virgin may have concealed her husband's homosexuality.

I'm not convinced that teaching primary age children how to have sex is an improvement.

It's so interesting the change in attitudes to sex and reproduction. I'm 46 with a dd at 20 and a ds at 10.

I thought I had done well with dd and the periods talk. Bought her a book, was open and honest, discussed periods and reproduction etc. Anyhow age 11 her period arrived. She told me, she had pads etc already. Had a cuddle and hot chocolate and so on. All good.

2 weeks later I left another pack of pads on her bed. She came down looking bemused with them asking why? Said oh so you have plenty and don't have to ask (massive issue for me at same age). But I've had my period? She was horrified and furious it would happen again and again and again. Poor love and shit parenting from me apparently.

And on holiday atm with ds10. He noticed the HRT patch on my thigh getting out of the pool and asked. Oh its HRT ds, sometimes when women get to my age, and their bodies start changing so we can't have babies anymore we need some medicine to make us feel better.

Oh he says. Hmmm, you are like an orca whale mum, they have a baby and then go through biological changes so they don't have another as they have to look after the one they have and it takes years. 🤣

As a midwife I heard couples say this and some women giving the Pill to their husbands and wondering why they were pregnant again 🙄

There were sex education films from the early 1900s, but it depended on whether you had access to them and why they were shown. Women didn’t often come out of these films in a positive light. The BFI put together a collection of them and they are fascinating.

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/archive-collections/introduction-bfi-collections/bfi-mediatheques/joy-sex-education

My great uncle was a soldier and got his name on the Portsmouth syphilis register. Married shortly before the first of several children who were born to him and his wife, her family seem to have been the only ones at the wedding. Apparently my granny didn’t like her brother and I always wonder if he was sent to join the army to keep him out of trouble.

@SafeMouse thank you for starting an interesting thread, poignant and funny.

Yes that was the message I was taught too, via my mum and the "helpful" Church of Scotland book. That you had to be married. Luckily I worked out how it really happened before I became sexually active. Your poor friend - did she keep the baby and was she OK?

Attitudes to sex have varied over history. We still seem to be recovering from Victorian prudishness (although ironically Victoria herself famously loved sex). It used to be thought that a woman had to orgasm to conceive so before this ‘lie back’ era, a lot of attention was paid to women’s pleasure.

Definitely not the case in irreligious lower working class families, as the number of rather hurried marriages in my Gt Grandparents' generation of mine and DW's families shows. Plus my G'father who was for years passed off as Great-Gran's youngest whereas his mother was actually her eldest daughter now turned into his "sister".

There was a post on her maybe 10 years ago, by a young Asian girl who'd come to live in the UK with her new husband, and had no idea about how the baby she was carrying would come out. She was in her 3rd trimester..

On another note, my PIL didn't let us share a room in their house until we were married. This was early 2000s!

Gosh, isn't that a parenting fail right there! I assumed in those days people were probably told before their wedding day, assuming they hadn't been told by a friend of course

I think marriage when pregnant was pretty common. My grandmother married less than nine months before my aunt turned up, in the 20s.

@Equivo I'm not sure why you think you know better than the OP. It's just as likely the first husband was impotent, or gay or asexual and had no interest in sex with a woman, but married because it was what you were expected to do/ he wanted a woman to cook and clean and look after him.

This happened to my mother! Her first husband was gay. She had no clue until after they got married and the wedding was not consummated. He had his own bedroom! After a few months of marriage, she left him and moved back to her parents. Who promptly sent her back to her husband as they didn't accept gay being a thing! 2 years she stuck it out before finally leaving. This would have been late 60's/early 70's.

I'm 42- my fairly religious mother told me that it's not possible to have a baby unless you're married. That was my sex talk.
School only did the periods and puberty talk, except in science where we learnt about sperm and eggs but not what actually happened.

Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper taught me everything at 15!

Catching up with this thread this morning makes me wonder....
I'm of the older generation who grew up with some sex ed in schools, the pill from Family Planning clinics, 'The Joy of Sex' and 'Our Bodies, Ourselves', Spare Rib magazine and the new women's pages in newspapers.

Were we better off than the younger women today under the influence of porn who are apparently led to believe it is normal to shave everything and endure choking, anal sex as a a matter of course and being spat on?

Do you have a reference for this because I can't find anything on Google and it sounds unlikely to me tbh.

Don't know about the masturbation bit, but the rest seems to be true. Obituary here for Chad Varah, founder of The Samaritans.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/nov/08/guardianobituaries.obituaries3

In 1935, Varah had conducted his first funeral, as an assistant curate in Lincoln, for a 13-year-old girl who had taken her own life, fearing she had venereal disease and would die a slow, painful and shameful death. In fact, the girl had started to menstruate. Varah vowed at her graveside to devote himself to helping other people overcome the sort of isolation and ignorance that had caused the girl to kill herself. He would do it through a combination of education, and by providing access to emotional support in times of need. As one of the earlier proponents of sex education, particularly to poorly educated young people, he earned the label, as he wryly observed later, of "a 'dirty old man' by the time I was 25".

I had been wondering about this, I will admit.

My grandmother gave birth three times and only learned at the end of her life, apparently, that she wasn't urinating from her vagina, as she'd always assumed.

Fascinating thread!

Just recalled my lovely, convent schooled, next-door neighbour from years ago. She married her husband because they had been to the cinema together and he'd held her hand. So she thought they'd better get married quickly before the baby arrived.