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

It’s mad, isn’t it? All this coy, secretive language around everything - in my family it was only ever ‘time of the month’ (mouthed like Les Dawson), and the menopause was ‘The Change’, as though we all become bloody werewolves or something! (Although tbf during mine I did become ferocious and unpredictable, and wandered around sleeplessly in the dead of night, so maybe that one’s warranted 😂.)

Oh God yes I had forgotten about the ‘don’t get into cars with strangers ‘ talk.

For people asking if this was true. I’d say it was. Inlaws of my sister.

the man was an abusive bully. The woman a put upon mouse, she’d grown up in care. She wore hand me downs, down at heel shoes, spoke I a whisper. As a young woman of late teens early 20s I thought babe was ridiculous. Now I’d have more compassion.

Ths happy ending is the couple split up & a few years later a bouncy happy attractive woman called me name &’chatted to me

I am in my 60's,my mum got pregnant when she was 17 and asked my gran "how will the baby get out?" "The same place it got in lass she replied"

This sort of 'infertility' has been reported across cultures in modern times. eg urban Japan

Stone age kids learned by watching others around the campfire. Rural kids learned by watching livestock. And obv religious notions and control of what is and is not 'proper' also cut off sex ed for a long time.

Religious influences, urban living, privacy etc all combined to make it difficult for youngsters to acquire knowledge the old fashioned way.

I had no warning of periods and my mum took me down to the thunderbox of all places to explain it to me when it first happened. Still amazed I'm as sane and normal as I am.

I remember our local co-op was still sanitary belts in the early 1970s.
I am not sure younger people understand how hard it could be to get knowledge before the internet. As a child and teenager especially you relied on what adults told you. I am in my sixties and ,y school library certainly did not have any books about sex. The local public library would only give you a child's ticket and you were not supposed to even go into the adult part of the library without an adult. Of course children talked in the playground. But in amongst accurate information, there was a whole load of nonsense. One of my friends was told by her mum that babies were born through the mums belly button. The Dr untied the belly button and took the baby out. I can totally understand why some girls would have known nothing about periods until they started. I was first taught about periods at school aged 12 after quite a few girls had already started.

I am 52. My mother bought me a belt and hook on pads. I posted early on in this thread about her naivete around sex due to her upbringing. She was/is a product of her parenting and background.

This happened to my great grandmother's younger sister. Son of the pastor knocked her up, prob rape. Her parents took the baby and raised him as their youngest son.

Same great grandmother we found out in recent years was also the product of an employment/coerced pregnancy. When her birth cert was finally located it gave her father as "Mr XY, Manager, business name". Her mother went to some trouble to conceal the facts. Gave alternate name for herself (Mary instead of Margaret) and alternate spelling for her family name. She always told family she and her husband (she married another man later) got married in a church in town AB when in fact they were married in registry office in town CD.

I am 61 and I had the same.

Can I recommend this great book? Sex Before the Sexual Revolution (cambridge.org)
It's so interesting, full of oral histories about what people really thought of intimacy in the early 20th century and how they had to work things out - innocent but not precluding pleasure or mutual understanding.
I agree that OPs great-granny's first husband may well have been gay or asexual and there wasn't the language or the willingness to discuss it openly.

When I was in high school in London in the 1970's we used to help out at various places; nurseries, primary schools, and a psychiatric unit for people who had been in mental hospitals for years so had become institutionalised. My friend and I befriended a lovely lady who told us that she had become pregnant at 17 & her parents had her sectioned and her baby adopted. She would tell us about her precious little boy and how she cried for him every day. It was so sad. She had spent her whole adult life locked away. I remember telling my mum about her and being really upset. Mum just used it as a warning "not to go messing about with boys".

@MeTooOverHere what is thunderbox please?

Oh if you don't know I don't want to explain it in detail.

Let's just say it's a toilet (in a separate structure in the garden) that only gets emptied once a week.

Please don't ask me for more info.

Spent some time today talking to DD on the back of this thread. She didnt know a lot of family stuff, that I only learned a few years ago.

In 1939 my GP's got married in the February. They were devoted to each other through 64 years of marriage and had three children. Their eldest childs birthday was August, which I knew but didnt really think about. Until my mother pointed out that Aunt was the same age as they were married in years. I must have looked shocked because she said that she hoped me knowing that hadnt tarnished my view of them. And it didnt, it really didnt! It made them more human to me. And it explained why they were so understanding and supportive of me becoming a single mother at the age of 17 (the age Gma was when they got married). I had been so worried about them being ashamed or angry, and they couldnt have been more loving about it, and now I know why. In fact they were more supportive than my mother was, and I know (because he told me later) that Gpa had a stern word with her, which then made sense of her change in attitude.

Then I thought about it more and how frightened must my Grandmother have been?! 17, pregnant and with war on the horizon with lots of young men joining up and leaving.....it would have been so easy for my Grandfather to enlist and bugger off and leave her to it. But he didnt. He was a good loving honorable man who "did the right thing". But when I think of her realising that her "monthly" wasnt happening and her nausea showing she was PG, she must have been so frightened.

She was fortunate to have fallen in love with a good kind man, and him to have fallen in love with a good kind woman. But I cant get out of my head how different it could have been, as so many tragic stories on here show.

I was thinking the same about a sheltered upbringing. I'm two years older than that poster, and that wasn't my experience. I don't remember my DM and I actually having a discussion, but she certainly gave me books on the subject - although I knew about it before then. Belts were still in use, but I soon graduated to tampons.

My mother told me that only married women were "allowed" to use tampons and confiscated the free sample of Tampax I had sent off for. I was 14 so this would have been 1987.

I am 51 and my mother had at least embraced the stick on pad, but belts and hooks where definitely a thing that you could buy. I had friends at school who were forced to use them. I worked in Superdrug for my Saturday job and we sold a lot of the pads.

Same here. I was the elder daughter. I got no warning. My sister was given books to read.

I remember The Two of US being about an unmarried couple living together. That was mid 1980s.

As for lack of sex education. My brother was in VI form of his school (boys school until 16, then mixed VI form). This would be mid 1980s.

One of his friends thought he had got his girlfriend pregnant, discussed it with my brother and neither of them knew if pregnancy was possible with what they had been doing.

My mother had a conversation with the friend, both he and his gf were virgins.

Yes engagement was actually a church ceremony for a while and you couldn't call it off easily.

I’ll never forget the conversation with a female patient who thought that ‘test-tube babies’ were somehow generated by inserting an actual test-tube into the vagina.

Yes that was a common misconception because they thought the hymen had to be broken by sex first.

How heartbreakingly sad. Not a rare occurrence either.

I have been helping a friend of mine help a relative of hers work out her true parentage. The relative is legally my friend's aunt and now aged 80. All her life she knew something was not right and now we have finally FINALLY established the facts.

Her bio mother was the eldest daughter/second eldest child on the family farm. Distance out of town, little money and few visitors. Got pregnant at 13 and went away with her mother to give birth and they returned with her mother now the mother of the new born, with falsified birth certificate and all.
Turns out the bio father was the eldest child/eldest son of the family. He was 14 at conception. Both her bio parents are deceased as are the grand parents who raised her. Both bio parents have other kids so with DNA we were finally able to establish what had happened.
Turns out she is actually half sister to my friend, not aunt.
Yes kids on farms can figure it out alright, not always with good outcomes.

It can’t be assumed that she consented to the act either.