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

How do you know?

Heck I’m 63 and truly thought I was dying when my periods started! No information from anyone or anywhere. After I’d blocked tho loo with paper my mother realised what was happening and gave me a booklet from the chemist, and some weird pants and pads that kind of hooked together 🤣

Do you mean impotent?

Love these stories. My grandma told me that her mother was pregnant by the love of her life when she married my great grandfather. That child was my grandmother. He, and the subsequent husband died leaving her as a wealthy woman with quite a lot of property including a pub and a shop. But when she died she was buried next to George, the great love.
Told all this to my mother and she was horrified and refused to believe a word!

My paternal grandma had her first child out of wedlock. Given the fact I am 62 and my father was 49 when I was born, we are going back into the late 1800/early 1900s.

It was always presumed my grandpa was the dad, and they had a a bit of going away to the Boar war comfort before he went.

Apparently not. My grandma always said my aunt was born in a workhouse. My grandma and aunt returned home once my aunt was born, to live
with my great grandparents.

My grandpa married my grandma once he was home from the war. Having done an ancestory.com DNA test is how I found out my eldest aunt was not my grandpa biological daughter.

What's the story? We will never know. My only thought that fits is my grandma was raped or the like, and that is why my grandma was allowed home with the baby, and my grandpa accepted it. Nothing else fits.

This takes me back to 1972 when I was newly engaged to a fellow student. At home and next door neighbour says So when are you getting married? And I heard myself saying," Oh I'm not sure we will, I think we might just live in sin." Neighbour just about imploded! I'll never forget her horrified face. Mum to her credit took it all in her stride though I think was v happy when we named a date.

I think the worry of ‘being compromised’ was very real for women then. My grandmother was in service as a young woman. She was terrified that the son of the household would rape her and married to get away from the situation. She had no power as his servant.

My mother was adamant I should be taking caster oil while I was pregnant (1997)

Unfortunately for her,I was just as adamant I wasn't going near the massive bottle she bought,let alone taking it

Roll onto 2008,my cousin admitted to taking it as her mother (my mother's sister) had told her to

My mother told her it was total rot and not to bother!

Then denied ever trying to get me to take it!

@Nosummerontheagenda Now that makes perfect sense. My grandparents met in service.

My grandma was a head cook, and my grandpa was a gardener working the land.

When he was called up for the boar war, I suspect she was compromised by someone she worked for now, from what you have just said. Thank you for responding

My grandparents obviously knew what to do, they had 10 kids.

Goodness @JustMeAndTheFish I'm just a year or so younger. You must have had a very sheltered upbringing. Were you brought up in England? You could still buy those belt things I think but I don't know anyone who used them.

FIL was the youngest of at least 18 children, 5 of which were either stillborn or died within a few days of birth.
He couldn’t understand why his mother was an invalid. She must have spent most of her life pregnant or nursing a baby.

Not RTFT so sorry if this has already been mentioned, but On Chesil Beach is about precisely this, and IIRC is set much later (30s or 40s?).

Basically the couple involved are inexperienced virgins on their honeymoon, and the woman is both mortified and terrified, whilst the man is anxious and ends up becoming angry. They both know ‘something’ is supposed to happen but they’re not really sure what or how. Tragically, they go from being happy and in love to being estranged because they’re both shy and they lack the knowledge and even the words to be able to begin a conversation about it.

It obviously wasn’t the norm, but then again in more repressed times and communities I think it probably wasn’t that uncommon either.

I knew a lovely lady, now passed, who thought that "oral sex" was kissing, until well into her 70s. She was horrified beyond belief when she found out the truth!!

I thought I was teaching birth control to displaced hill triibes on the Burmese /Thai border in the 1990s... couldn't understand why families were still expanding when they had made an express desire for only 1 or 2 .and I had been diligent in explaining condoms and their usage ..

Unfortunately I am stupid and did not appreciate the literalism of what I was teaching .. I demonstrated the correct fitting of a condom by using my assistance thumb...

Apparently they had all reverently applied said condom to their husband's thumbs .. and still got pregnant.

Lesson learned for me.

"Waterstones was also once selling mini stocking filler typed books of a late 19th century guide for wives. ...I seem to remember it basically told you how to make the experience so unappealing that your husband wouldn't want to do it very often."

Ooh, I bet a fair few women were lining up to buy that! 😉

I heard of a similar situation with the pill - women using them as beads to make "virginity necklaces".

Sadly also with colonisation and missionaries imposing their views on other countries

@SacreBleugh I’m 6 years younger, and when I first got my period my mum said she’d better “get a belt” for me. There followed a slightly confused conversation where she tried to explain what the hell she was going on about, and I ended up cackling with laughter and saying, “don’t worry about it, mum, I think I’ll be fine with Lilletts”. It was 1981!

My mum was lovely in every way (and actually quite young and otherwise ‘with it’ at the time), but my god she was prudish and would do anything to avoid discussing sex or biological functions, and usually ended up flustered or angry when cornered into this kind of conversation. I think at the time she must have still been using a ‘belt’ herself - a relic from her own mother’s advice, though Christ knows what kind of fusty old chemist she must have been getting her supplies from as I don’t remember seeing them in Boots!

But in keeping with the thread, it’s just another example of the kind of embarrassment that kept people ignorant and ashamed of perfectly normal functions.

Yes in the north of England. We had a birds and bees talk at primary but we were all left more confused than informed - one girl asked if you could get pregnant by kissing. We were told to go home and tell our mums what we’d been talking about and they’d carry on the convo. Mine just said “that’s nice”. So when I started I honestly thought I was terminally ill! It wasn’t a belt as such but granny knickers with plastic loops for attaching the towels. I soon discovered Tampax and decided that seeing as no-one had bothered to tell me anything then I was keeping everything private from then on.
I just hope I did better with my own children. I think I did.

Periods were called ‘the Curse’. That’s how my mother referred to them. I never heard her use the word period, and she had been a nurse.

Many years ago, on a late night radio show, this same topic - lack of knowledge about our own bodies in the past - was being discussed. A woman who said she was in her 70s called to say that she and her friend used to play in the fields with some of the boys until, one day, her friend called at her house to tell her something important. "You know that thing we do with the boys? You can get a baby from doing that, my sister told me" 'What? So we didn't do it again'. She was talking about the 1920s. Innocence

You mean they were having sex with the boys? I don’t understand.

Yes. That was what she meant.