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

This comment has pushed me over the edge. 🤣🤣🤣

Women's lives were dreadful.

My mum used to tell lots of funny stories about her awful grandmother. There she sits in family photos, stone faced and miserable, a 4'10" woman surrounded by her 6 massive sons. Stories of her grumpiness abounded, and she was a bit of a joke among my mum and her cousins.

Years later my DD did an ancestry project with school. She looked into her more deeply. Orphaned at 8 after a suicide. Got a position as a maid at 12 to my great great grandfather, a man in his 40s. First child born before she was 14. 5 more followed. It looks like they never married- likely because without marriage she had no hope of support for her or her children. She was raped as a child, bore multiple massive kids (great great grandad was also well over 6 foot as were all the sons) and now mum looks back on her with clearer eyes and an adults perception, she thinks she probably had some significant health problems (incontinence) caused by being a child herself bearing massive children.
Looking at the few photos we have of her now feels very poignant. No wonder she wasn't smiling.

In my family there's the story of some great aunt and uncle who never had children because they didn't know how to do it. It does beg the question as to why no one told them how to do it though. I don't find it hard to believe that this ignorance existed in the past at all.

That’s so true. The swinging 60s and sexual liberation + contraception was more of a thing in the wealthier parts of the country.

My mum left the north for a bit of freedom
and fun overseas but she was very much the exception and actually took her sexual naïevety with her. Although she did get over it quite quickly when planted in a large wealthy urban metropolis 😂

Poor, poor woman.

When we visited my now late MIL we found her ready to throw masses of 'old rubbish' away, we went through it and there were birthday and Christmas cards from the Somme, poems men had written in the trenches and old certificates. One certificate was her mother's wedding certificate, about 4 months before her birth, she was most annoyed when we pointed this out, her mother had always been held up to be a paragon of virtue. Later was discovered that her mother had had another child a couple of years earlier, raised as its grandparents' child but as MIL had died we never knew if she knew. OH remembered visiting Great Aunt Rose who was actually his mother's sister. Families are very complicated.

Sex just wasn’t talked about, particularly amongst women.

The economics of marriage were really impirtant (pre welfare state & women had such limited rights) but people still liked sex. A lot of brides were pregnant in the 17th & 18th C because it was accepted that sex cod happen once a couple was committed to marrying.

Oh, now you spoil it, I had visions of you both wandering into the man's flat!

If two people desire each other they'll figure it out if they communicate. If a woman has any sexual desire she will be able to tell the man where to touch and the right spot to put it should become fairly obvious!! I suspect in these stories sexual desire wasn't there.

I think there is a big rural / urban divide too. Anyone on a farm knows from a young age how it works.

This is horrific, the poor girl.

Find this thread all a bit far fetched.... Victorian women had huge families, both sets of my grandparents were all from families of 10 plus.

Then there were all the sexual scandals and which Cousin or Niece looks like their Uncle!!!

My Great Uncle ran off with a Maid, left his 9 kids and wife and then had another 7 with his new woman in Australia.

Nature will always take over, if it doesn't, i can only imagine that the poor woman in question had married a gay or of course vice versa.

I beg to differ!

It certainly is an eye opener! My DM told me about "the facts of life" in the 70s, but I knew all about it much earlier than that because I read a lot of books and many of them described the act in detail.

That story reminded me of my gran. Back in about 1920 her fiance went off to Canada to make money to marry her. When he came back she was married to his best friend. He went back to Canada. Gran met his sister years later and she said he was still single as gran was the only one for him. So sad and gran and grandad splitup, quite a scandal in the 1940s as they were so unhappy. Never were a couple less suited.

Early 70's I was in junior school and we were sat down to watch a slide show (about sex). Never had I been to a farm, knew anyone who had a baby, or had any pets other than goldfish. A lot of the boys went around asking 'strange' questions of the girls afterwards. It was a good 8 years later before I cottoned on what the whole odd slide show was about.

At secondary school there was a lot of talk about sex, we did reproduction of animals in biology but I still didn't realise how women got pregnant. My mother would often tell me 'don't go getting pregnant!' But I was too shy to ask. She told me about periods but I didn't know they were connected to babies.

A lot of odd conversations and comments from those in my class in the know made me go to the library one Saturday when I was about 13/14 and search through health and medical books until I found out how to get pregnant. (And thus ensure I didn't!)

The day we left school we were given a sex education lesion and drugs lesson.

Many years later I asked my mum why she hadn't discussed sex with me and she said well you did have lessons at school. Apparently she had to sign a bit of paper to say I could watch the slide show!!!!!

That's so heartbreaking, how rejected and unloved her child (your grandma?) must have felt her whole life.
Can't imagine leaving my daughter behind like this, in favour of a horrible selfish man - and raising his child instead of my own! But of course, I live and judge by today's standards. Poor woman probably didnt have much (if any) choice back then.
*edited to ask: do you know if they ever managed to reconnect?

I agree that kids on farms knew how sex worked. Part of my family were raised on farms and they all said they had no sex education, but just saw what animals did.
In the past masturbation was sinful. Children were told not to touch their genitals - or "down there". How would they have any idea what kind of touch they liked? Even in the eighties there was a lot of emphasis on women touching themselves to discover what they liked. Many women even then had never touched themselves.

I’m slightly older, but there was still a lot of ignorance about how you got pregnant and periods back in the 80s / 90s and there was all kind of weird myths and old wives tales still in circulation that where regularly discussed in teenage magazines and cropped up on the problem pages.

I don’t think a virgin would be able to tell a man where to touch or where to put it, no. I remember inserting my first tampon. I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it and the instruction leaflet was puzzling . If a woman has no experience of sex she certainly won’t be able to issue instructions. Many men in former times had little idea of the mechanics either .

I heard of a couple who were married 40 years and never consummated their marriage because they were both shy and never broached the topic.

Ian McEwans book On Chesil Beach explores this topic too.

When my parents went to the doctor to discuss fertility as they had been married a while without mum getting pregnant the first thing the doctor did was check they were actually having sex. Apparently given the lack of sex Ed at school/home it wasn’t as unusual as you’d think for a married couple to assume that they must needed to sleep in the same bed to have children. And this would have been the late 60s

I remember my grandma (who would have been well in to her hundreds now) telling me she once shyly asked a friend how babies came out of a ladies tummy in response to being told a neighbour had given birth. She was around 18 at the time.
The response was "same way they're put in!"
She said she was left non the wiser but too embarrassed to ask for any more information 🤣🤣🤣

I was thinking about Chesil Beach. Who would you ask if you don’t know what to do? There wasn’t anyone really. It wasn’t a subject for discussion.

I did this tracing ancestors with my Mum, now in her 90s, and it turned out that her gran, who she was and still is very fond of, had had 4 children, one of whom had died young. Mum knew about the other 3, her Dad, her uncle and her Aunt, but knew nothing of the little boy, her other uncle who died young. Mum struggled to understand why her Gran had never spoken about the boy she lost. That would have been normal then, 1890s, I felt that we were intruding and I have never raised the ancestors since then.