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

The idea that heterosexual people don’t feel driven to go for penis in vagina sex or know to do it instinctively, though, I find pretty far fetched.

Yes, if you’re a gay man in 1910 married to a woman, or vice versa gender wise, and/or you hate the look of them and are in a marriage of convenience, I can see how you are not going to be overcome with lust and pursue PIV sex.

quite a high percentage of people, stastically, are gay, and I’d think that was a much more likely explanation for most (not all of course) l celibate marriages than lack of understanding about what goes where.

My mother told me babies came out of a gateway on your leg. I begged and begged my mother to show me her gateway. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t have one !

My parents met in the late 40s when dad was demobbed. He was a Catholic from Ireland, she was a Presbyterian from Ulster. Ten months after the wedding she had her first baby, 11 months later I was born so they were married less than 2 years and had two children. Her story was the priest came round to see how she was the day after I was born, he asked her if she'd been told any nonsense about Catholic marriages meaning you had a baby every year. She said no but he said if there was an issue he would speak to my father about it and make sure she wouldn't have to have another baby the following year. She reassured him and asked him not to. She said she could have died of embarrassment to be talking about such things to a priest.

A few years later my youngest sibling was born, poor mother was again mortified as her midwife was a nun. She was horrified because the nun would know she'd had sex. When she told me I reassured her that it wouldn't come as a shock to a midwife.

My grandparents were married a year before my great grandmother gave them a book to explain the birds and bees. Weirdly my grandmother had attended births and lived on a farm so knew how the baby got out just not how it got in!

No,I most definitely did give it to her. But then I have a very warped sense of humour! I'm sure that he washed his hands first. Surely most of the population enjoy their own company and then prepare food for others at some point. I don't think that he was a pervert. It was midday, i think that he assumed everyone was at work and that no one would be able to easily see into his basement flat living room. Ordinarily he would have been right, had I not taken his mail down to him and gone right past his window. You couldn't see in through his flat from the road or front path.

I’m really not sure about it being common that people were accidentally doing only anal. Surely women know they don’t bleed from their bumhole even if their husband didn’t give them “fanny flutters” so they had a clue he should be going in the front. I would’ve thought frequent anal without lubrication would be enough to make you want to give up on having kids 😱

I wonder who the first person to work it out was and how? Do you think any animals have worked it out?

The wife in On Chesil Beach has been sexually abused by her father. That is the reason for her freezing and running away screaming. It’s not ignorance of sex, in fact the total opposite.

I remember, aged about 12, sitting in the garden with my Mum, my Auntie and my Gran.
They must have been talking about sex or intimacy because my Gran pipes up with "I only felt funny like that once, when Bill put his tongue in my mouth". Turned out she's only ever had one orgasm in her married life (by accident), the one and only time they had intimately kissed. They got together when my Nan (and Grandad) were young, 15/16ish. Did nothing more than hold hands, Grandad got sent of to fight in WWII, got married in around 1949. She had 4 older sisters who you'd have thought would have had a chat with her but as in some working class families of the time, sex wasn't discussed.

I was horribly embarrassed by the conversation at the time (I'd just experienced my first kiss IIRC) but as an adult I thought it so sad. They obviously adored each other, she remained a widow (and never dated anyone) for a good 30 years after he died in his late 50's.

A friend of mine told me a while back that she was mortified when she had her first child as her mother would know she had had sex!!! ( She was married).

My late MIL told me that when she had her first child (over 80 years ago) she thought the boy was deformed because she'd never seen a naked male before. She herself was amazed at her ignorance back then - she was very young.

She also once asked me if I thought it was true that women masturbate. I assured her that it was said to be very common indeed. And, to my shame, changed the subject.

I vaguely remember coming across a book with a title along the lines of A Guide for the young Wife. The chapter on reproduction began with a sentence announcing "we shall start by considering the reproductive cycle of the tadpole". I do not remember how this was supposed to help...

Waterstones was also once selling mini stocking filler typed books of a late 19th century guide for wives. It was utterly depressing in how it portrayed sex as an ordeal to be ensured. 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. I suppose prior to contraception, keeping sex to a minimum was the only way to avoid many pregnancies and, when martial rape wasn't recognised as a crime, you had to get manipulative to avoid sex.

In my great great grandmothers diary she talks about how she is concerned that her husband (my great great grandad) has an unknown medical condition as his phallus often appears and is noticeable through his clothes. She goes on to say how she asked him to show her so she could help him to check for a medical condition but he told her it is not something a woman should see 😂. Clearly he did show her eventually, they had 11 children 😂

If no names were mentioned, it's a case of no harm no foul. I know a lot of physicians, surgeons, etc, and they all mention cases they've seen, with no names or other identifying info.

There's a book situated in rural Ireland of yore, written by Eric Cross, called The Tailor and Ansty, with a plot involving infertility and a cause similar to many issues mentioned here. It was published in the 1940s and was banned in Ireland because of its frankness on the topic of sex.

My SIL called MIL and asked her what hole it went in as they couldn't figure it out. This was in 2000-ish

I don’t remember that so apologies. I read it years ago and to me it was about what damage sexual ignorance does in a relationship.
I had several friends who were quite religious at University. They were totally ignorant about sex. They waited till marriage and had built up huge expectations about how amazing sex would be .

Such a sad but interesting post.

Sorry though, do you mean they were married or were never married in the end?

‘Lie back and think of England’ was a commonly used phrase because it was an experience to be endured . My husband’s grandmother had four children and divorced her husband on the grounds of cruelty ( unheard of at the time). She apparently hated ‘that upstairs business’ as she called it.

Oh I am LOVING this thread.

Thanks so much for the book recommendation @PyongyangKipperbang, have just ordered it on Amazon.

Trigger warning

Interesting what you say about tribalism @Newusernameforthiss. I went to boarding school with a girl whose father had worked as an ObGyn in West Virginia. In the 1970s when her Dad was a newly qualified doctor, a girl of about 16 came into the hospital in labour one day. She lived with her extended family, deep into the Appalachian Mountains. He asked her about periods. Clueless. When she was due. Clueless. Sex. Clueless. Did she actually know how babies were made? Clueless. Between contractions he had to explain the facts of life and how babies came to be made and there was no reaction. He asked her who had put their penis in her vagina and in her Eastern drawl said 'well it could be by daddy, my Grandaddy, my uncle, my brother or my cousin'. I appreciate how horrific this is but on further investigation it turns out that it really was a free for all and nobody actually understood how babies came to be.

@Scentedjasmin "he was sat on the sofa in front of his bay window in full view" it seems like he wanted to be seen by someone walking past and he was. I still wouldn't be in a hurry to eat something prepared by this man and your poor mother obviously felt the same.

It must have been a shock when they eventually got down to it! I always think if you have managed to put it off until marriage it’s probably not going to be that good (anti religious cultural prejudice maybe there!)

Yes , that’s the point. Too much expectation and no real experience. One of them got pregnant and had to leave University. One of the others I saw shortly after she got married. She looked absolutely miserable. She had been so excited to have sex and kept asking me what it was like. The reality didn’t match up I fear.

I fairly recently saw how a chinese couple were wondering why they did't get pregnant and why it hurt for her. The doctor found out he was using her bum
Oh dear

Awful.