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 is still common practice within ultra Orthodox Jewish communities. The act of sex amongst married Orthodox couples is so fascinating too. I think the hole-in-the-sheet thing has been debunked at this stage but I still think that sex has to happen in a way that rabbis deem appropriate.

Wow. Why on earth would I come and post something that's not true? It is entirely true and I don't know why you're projecting at me. Issues? What about this triggered you?

I've no idea what you're even trying to convey as your post makes no sense

This reminds me of a woman in my small home town.
Every time I saw her on the street, she had another child and/or she was pregnant again.
I don’t know if she was married because I never saw her with a man - only with a Russian nesting doll’s set of children.
I hadn’t thought of her in decades, until I read your post.
I shudder to imagine how many children she has now and wonder why nobody stepped in to help her.
She’d be in her 70s now, I suspect.

I was a teenager in the sixties, I had access to my mum's copy of The Illustrated Medical encyclopedia, Lady Chatterly's Lover, my brother's hidden stash of magazines and The News of the World. I was an avid reader.

Just as well, sex ed in school was stamens and pollen.

My late grandmother said she didn't know what a willy was until she was married - she didn't word it like that, I don't think she could bring herself to give 'it' a name. She then said she saw one for the first time when her son was born, so they either DTD in the dark or under covers.

My grandad was married to a woman who died of TB in her 30s. On her death bed she said "Will you marry my sister and look after her?" The sister had had a broken engagement. He did. My grandmother.
I recounted that to a Nigerian colleague and she said they do that in Nigeria too. (This was over 20 years ago.)

This has reminded me of the story I was passed on about my own great granny. She probably had a bit of a wedding night shock, too. Anyhow, some months later, let's say 9? She had no idea what giving birth entailed. The midwife turns up and starts tying strips of linen to the head of the bed: she freaked out, thinking she was going to be tied to the bed. Midwife informs her that no- they're to hold on to. Until the last moment, she thought the baby was going to emerge from her belly button.

She was VERY INSISTENT upon making sure her daughter know everything growing up- hence the story has been passed down in living technicolour.

In the late 1960s I met a woman who said that if you took a dose of castor oil as your labour started it would result in a shorter labour as the castor oil would grease the baby’s head! I think she was confused by the fact that at that time some maternity units ( Hammersmith Hospital for one ) did give a dose of castor oil because pre birth enemas were standard.

😁😁😁

So I guess that means there's a lot to be said in favor of the old tradition of a father taking his son to a brothel?

Well I wouldnt say that anything can be said in favour of it, but it may well explain why it was done.

When I was a child an aunt told me that it was important to keep my belly button clean as this was what babies breathed through in the womb. This was in the 1970s and she wasn't joking!

This is still common practice within ultra Orthodox Jewish communities. The act of sex amongst married Orthodox couples is so fascinating too. I think the hole-in-the-sheet thing has been debunked at this stage but I still think that sex has to happen in a way that rabbis deem appropriate.

The hole in the sheet thing is complete nonsense. It is the result of people applying Christian attitudes towards sex to a religion with completely different ideas around sex. The only thing the two religions have in common is that, for orthodox people, sex should be between married people of the opposite sex. And there it ends. Judaism recognises that sex is not just for making children, it is an important part of a loving relationship between husband and wife. Not only is there no sexual prudery in the privacy of a Jewish relationship, but it is the husband's duty to give his wife sexual pleasure.

The rabbinic rules are about the minimum frequency the wife can expect (not what he can demand from her) and about ritual purity, so the wife refrains from sex until her period is over and she has had a ritual bath, and the husband also does a ritual bath on Friday evening, in preparation for the Sabbath and his duty of pleasing his wife. Some people think that having to refrain from sex for up to two weeks every month is onerous, but Jewish couples who practice this say it actually increases their desire for each other and their pleasure in each other.

Yes, some communities do have a woman who teaches the bride. She may already have a reasonable knowledge of her anatomy and of how babies are made. The woman's job is to make sure the bride knows not just what to expect, but what she can expect.

As a counter to these rather nasty experiences.of sex I'll tell of a nice one I found in 'Daughters of Empire'. A young bride was on honeymoon in India with her British army officer husband.
The Indian Mutiny broke out and she and other wives were captured and put into the Black Hole of Calcutta where many died including our bride.
She left her diary behind and in it she had written of her wedding night.She wouldn't use a sordid word like sex. She wrote instead of 'such delicious nighterie' with her husband. That is rather charming, I thought.

@dudsville. 🤣

My Dad’s farming family must’ve worked it out a couple of centuries ago, because when my Mum researched his family history, she discovered that nearly all the first born children were born just six or seven months after the wedding.

They’d clearly made good use of hay lofts, etc. while they were courting. 🤣

You are only speaking from your own experience. When I found out that a penis is supposed to go inside a vagina I was horrified and couldn’t work out the mechanics!

I'm late 40s, my cousins are early to mid 50s. My cousin laughingly told to me that when her older brother was born the midwife had to expain to my aunt not only how the baby had got in, something to which she was completely oblivious, but also to her she terror, how it was getting out. My aunt and uncle were also members of the belly button school if belief. Not sure how white they'd managed conception. We cannot imagine the shock. By all accounts, the woman was distraught. Everything about it is beyond belief- yet true, in the 70s.

My grandmother, born in 1898 in Germany, thought you got pregnant if a boy kissed your arm. I asked her what would have happened if the boy tried to do something else more likely to actually cause pregnancy and she admitted she might have let other stuff happen but would hold her arm over her head.

Yawn. Believe, or not, whatever you like. Such a fun sponge you are, with very little imagination as to the line of work I might do, and so naive as to the amount of gossip that goes on between departments! Of course everyone shares the weirdest stories. There’s nowt as weird as folk!

A boy in my class told me what sex was during a break at lunch one day.
It was the 1970’s and I was 8.
Then he showed me a picture of a dance group called Hot Gossip and told me when he grew up he was going to ‘do sex’ to them all.
When we finally got the ‘talk’ from a female science teacher in Year 8 - devout single sex Catholic school - one cheeky girl asked, ‘I bet you haven’t fornicated have you Miss?’ As the teacher wasn’t married.
I learned all I wanted to know by reading Jackie Collins.
Fell madly in love when I was 14 with a boy of 18. Both Catholic and he kindly said we’d have to break up due to the ‘age difference’ and I was heartbroken. Explained I was too young and he respected my parents.
When I went to our GP to get the Pill in the late 80’s my mum had written to the doc when I was 14 to give parental consent to me having the Pill.
I only asked her about it when she was terminally ill. And she said…
Well I could see how much in love the two of you were. I didn’t want you to get pregnant but I could see that the pair of you were nuts about each other.
When I was 20 the ‘boy’ came back into my life and said he still loved me and could he have another chance? I stubbornly said no out of pride and I adored him.
Life, it’s a funny old thing isn’t it?

Landlady of the pub my parents drank in in the late 1970s was Irish. When she got married she thought she laid on the bed and her husband would stand at the end of the bed and pee in to her belly button.

Her family had to send for a priest who brought a book with him.

In the TV series Unorthodox there is a woman whose job it is to go to girls about to marry and explain what sex is.

@BruFord that was fairly common, it was more important to have children than to be a virgin. YOu need people to work on a farm and if they are your children you don't need to pay them.

@AlpiniPraline That's happened a couple of times in the royal family. I think more to do with treaties and alliances. Henry VIII married his brother's widow.

Mary of Teck was supposed to may Prince Albert Victor, but he passed away so she married his brother.

Im mid 40s and one of my nans (sadly no longer with us) was an only child. I only found out long after she’d gone when I started researching my family tree. It was so unusual back then I can’t help but wonder why, and whether my great grandparents were on the side of not knowing what to do.

Well a lot of people must have understood how it happened. People marrying when the woman was already pregnant has been happening since the beginning of time.

My great gran was illegitimate. Before she died she wrote down her experiences of growing up.

She was put into an orphanage until the age of about 12. When her mother married and had other children gran was sent to live with her as a help/nanny. Gran believed her to be an aunt (and called her that until she died).
"Aunt" tried to return gran to the orphanage, but gran ran back somehow and she was sent out to work.

Gran was very much in the dark about all things sexual. She had no close female relations to talk to but...
On the night before her wedding, when it became apparent she was utterly clueless, her "Aunt" told her the truth about her parentage, how babies were made and what to expect on her wedding night. A huge amount to take in for her. Gran was in her 20s. That was the late 1920s.

There's a very stern, respectable portrait of "Aunt" and as a young adult, finding out the story I remember thinking how awful she abandoned her child. Obviously I've matured a whole lot since then, and there was probably no choice for her but to give up the child or face stigma and possible ruin for life. The story goes that "Aunt" had become pregnant whilst at university in the early 1900s. Gran's father was engaged to someone else and that was that.