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

In first year of senior school, aged 11, the girls were separated off to have a talk from the female staff about periods.
A friend, who was popular with, and confident around, boys (regularly played kiss-chase in the playground), said to me, in all seriousness, that as the girls were being told about periods by the women teachers, the boys must be being told about their periods by the male teachers. She genuinely didn't know only girls got periods.
That was in the 70's.

My mother and I were passing my neighbour's basement flat recently, when I noticed him partaking in a little solo enjoyment. So I quickly ushered my mother in through the front door! She wanted to know, in a loud voice, why I was in such a hurry, so i duly explained, to which she replied in utter shock, "BUT I THOUGHT HE WAS MARRIED??!!". 😁

My mother's sex education for me was 'a man will kiss you all over' and she bought me a book that explained I'd start to grow hairs and how to cut your toenails

That was it

I learned about periods at school (I vaguely knew they'd Start and I'd bleed but not much else)

My class was the only class in the school that missed sex education as the teacher refused to teach it

Thank god for magazines like just 17 and mizz-it's where I learned the ins and outs

Once mine where old enough to ask,I told them-nothing was off limits,I was determined they'd know in their own time

To clarify, i hurried my mother in through my front door and not the neighbours! She would have fainted had I done so!

Sorry, but you can't leave this here. How on earth did you notice?

Thankfully not.

Ive always had an understanding that without sex ed you may not know you were pregnant, or how you got pregnant. The mind boggling thing was that you can be married for 9 years, not have sex, and not understand (or no one tell you) why you weren't conceiving. But as has been said, that's the privilege of education that we now have.

He lived in the basement flat (with it's own entrance). We lived in the flat above with a shared entrance to 3 flats above. Some post for him had been delivered to our communal letter box, so I decided to take it down to him. Unfortunately, this took me past his lounge bay window and he was sat on the sofa in full view.

Oh dear.

It was AIDS that brought in sex education in schools. Before that lots of schools did not have any sex education. My mum said her school sex education was about how flowers reproduced. Kids brought up in farms knew about sex from the animals. So way back people will have known what sex was. But once people moved into teh cities, that link was lost for many.

Days later, he appeared with a jar of homemade chutney for us. I regifted it to my mother and she thoroughly enjoyed it...until once she had finished the jar, I told her where it had come from!

My father was working overseas in a very poor community and he said that many people there didn't connect the 2 events that occurred 9 months apart!
The husband of my mother's cousin told my father that he had never seen his wife naked and they were married over 40 years.
When I was in my teens in the '60s there were still a few girls who thought you couldn't get pregnant your first time or if you did it standing up.

@NeverDropYourMooncup I didn't understand a word of this - Well, they do call it the Tree of Knowledge, after all. I don't think the Serpent was explaining to Eve the intricacies of the Offside Rule with how eager she was to let Adam in on what she knew. Or that Apples taste good.Probably accounts for the 'in sorrow shall you bring forth children' too - not because they weren't in the garden anymore (the non embarrassing explanation), more 'yeah, this is what happens when you have sex and pushing them out hurts'.

Such a great read!

When I was in my teens in the '60s there were still a few girls who thought you couldn't get pregnant your first time or if you did it standing up.
This was still believed by girls in the 70's and 80's in my experience @JudgeJ !

I know someone who had a large family that they certainly could not afford to have. The GP prescribed the contraceptive pill to the woman. When she returned to him pregnant again, he exasperatedly asked her why she hadn't taken the pill properly and her reply was that it didn't work as her husband was taking it.

I often think about how unexpectedly horrifying these DNA match things must be, for some people in the older generations. Bet they were so relieved to have glossed over the details of how children were conceived in such cases, and wouldn't have ever dreamed about Ancestry.com and the rest, decades in the future!!

I thought you were going to say she took it as a pessary.

This thread is eye opening, times have changed so quickly when you think about it.

@scentedjasmin Why on earth would you give it to your mother, I wouldn't want to eat anything prepared by a man who'd openly sat pleasuring himself in full view of a window and possible passers by, the pervert!

It may be poetic licence.

In France, sex education takes place on an afternoon in year 7. The teachers' blushes are spared because it is delivered by doctors and nurses from a local hospital. Very little is held back. Of course, many of the kids have some knowledge by then, but there's a lot of bravado, which the doctors and nurses are fully aware of, and know how to deal with. The parents know when today was "sex ed day" because the kids emerge from school white as a sheet, and don't talk all the way home.

I knew someone who was a nurse training in the 1960’s who thought sperm were little fish that crawled across the bed, no surprise then she got pregnant the first time she had sex. Another person in her 60’s always wore pants in bed because if she didn’t he would try & slip it in while she was asleep!
when I was 5 my mom was doing parent education classes & there was a film of Folella Benjamin giving birth. Can you believe, sure it must of had an effect I became a midwife.😄

We have a funny family story that my great aunt and uncle didn't have children for the first 9 years of their marriage because they didn't know what they were supposed to do. Apparently another family member has to show them by pointing to rabbits in a hutch 🤣. This was in the early 1930s and they only had one child.

😂😂😂😂