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 gran said it was not uncommon back in the day (she was born in 1912). So common that if a woman could not get pregnant and went to the GP, the GP would question quite closely what the couple were actually doing.

My grandmother said the same to me. She thought she was bleeding to death. My other grandmother was not told about sex and didn’t tell my mother about it either. Apparently my great grandmother was adamant that neither of her daughters should be told about it . Which suggests she found sex very traumatic herself.

Think about it though. There is quite a gap between the night of conception and obvious signs of pregnancy, especially to a lay person.

So in prehistory, until relatively recently, its not odd to think that they might not make the connection between sex and pregnancy.

There is a book by Petrina Brown about womens sex lives throughout history that I highly recommend.

My gran said when she was in labour with her first child, she asked the midwife how the child was going to come out.

This. And particularly the lovely sentiments in the final paragraph.

Or she was a beard for 9 years and didn't realise.

@SafeMouse I'm wondering how old you are (I'm mid 40s) because I genuinely find it mind boggling that you didn't realise this was a very real situation, pretty much in the same way that it's been said a great many men & women never understood why the female of the couple continually had babies.

A lady I knew, who would have been married in the early 1940s, remained childless, and knowing what I knew of her, I wouldn't be at all surprised if she had no idea what was required in order to conceive.

Well I can only tell you what I was told by the person who was told it. 🤷‍♀️

With what a huge ordeal they apparently found it each time, it’s very likely he wasn’t fully erect. Plus men can actually pee while erect: it’s just not very easy, comfortable or practical!

Bit like us peeing straight after sex I suppose - pretty tricky, but doable if you put your mind to it!

These stories are completely believable to me. I (tried to) have sex for the first time at around 17 and had a reasonably sheltered upbringing in the sense that I had never seen a naked man before then, not even a picture or a video or whatever (normal in the past, reasonably unusual in my generation!). We genuinely couldn't figure out how to do it, and I knew the theory. I can imagine that if you didn't even know the theory and were with a man who either wasn't fussed or also didn't know,.you really would be confused.

Didn't he wonder why her toes curled up?

Similar happened to my mother in the 60s. She was born into a very prudish family in Ireland. Sex was NEVER mentioned, mum thought she was dying when she got her first period etc. She got engaged at 17 but had no clue about anything. It was the girls she worked with who ended up telling her about sex, right before her wedding. She was so horrified and terrified that she was never able to consummate the marriage. Sadly her husband died when they were still young. She got over her sex phobia by her second marriage.

I read an autobiography in the 1940s describing that exact situation.

My mum's sister (who would be about 100 years old now) married a very shy man and apparently they couldn't figure out why they couldn't have children. Eventually they saw the doctor and he had to explain sex to them. Neither of them had a clue. They didn't go on to have children, so presumably that explanation was a bit of a shock!

Well, that's one way to keep your feet warm at night.

Yes that happened to my nan too, no one told her about periods and she thought she was dying. Poor nan lost her own mum to breast cancer when she was 9. She made sure my mum knew about them. Nan herself lived to age 95 in good health!

The Samaritans was set up after a young girl had been masturbating ang git her period. She knew nothing about periods, though she had harmed herself or it was a punishment, and killed herself.
Even when I was young, the only information for many people was from the people they knew.

Complete sexual innocence wasn't unusual in some societies. One of my father's cousins was horrified by the idea of kissing her husband on her wedding night and he (who knew how babies were made) went furiously round to see his new MIL (a mother of 10) and ask her why the hell she hadn't told her daughter what was going to happen...

They went on to have about 8 DC. I was told this story by one of them, who was a very scrupulous and honest person.

Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI didn't get it right for years apparently.

What’s it called? I would be interested to read it.

Ah, sounds like the story of Flambards 😍

About 30 years ago, when I started work, I had a job as an admin assistant in the field of women's health care and a gynaecologist told us that at that time, about 5% of couples whom he saw suffering from infertility were infertile because they had not got sex right. So this was in the 1980s!

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

I thought the same, @Equivo - and of course back then "committing a homosexual act" could mean a jail sentence

Only for men though; apparently the same for women never made it onto the statue books, because when told Victoria refused to believe women would do "that sort of thing"

This is a real eye opener. Trying to remember how I learnt about ‘it’.
But in the old days, no sex ed at school. Mustn’t masturbate or you’re going to hell, no TV to learn from either. I guess if you really fancy each other, one thing leads to another but if the kissing doesn’t really get off the ground I can see there being problems….

I worked with a lady about 20 years ago who told me when she was 20 she accidentally fell asleep on the bus on her way home from work, she was then worried for weeks as she thought she would be pregnant as she had heard that you get pregnant by "sleeping near a man" she eventually shared her worries with her mother who told her you couldn't get pregnant on a bus 🤣 but didn't actually tell her anything else so she was pretty shocked when she got married a year later!

So Louis and Marie Antoinette were the original "soakers"?

My mother used to tell me not to go into a field with boys. I had no idea what she was getting at!