AIBU to wonder how some people coped in former times?

[Flyingfish2019]

When they had 12 children, husband was working down the mines 16 hours a day, no transportation, no frozen/canned food, no fridge, constantly pregnant. No help if somebody suffered a disability (and I think this was likely working down the mines those days).

I just wondered because I have far less then 12 children and dh does not work down the mines and still we are often soooooo tired. Children keeping us awake play a role in this... how would we cope if there was 12 of them and we had to live under the conditions described above?

I always wonder how introverts handled the community spirited days, people coming in and out of your house all day and night must have been exhausting.

I think people in Britain today act like the wealthy gentry of yesteryear. We pay peanuts for slave labour abroad and advert our eyes to the reality of those people's lives. It's easy for us to do as we don't physically see it. But actually most of us are no better than the wealthy of the past.

@tinklylittlelaugh what makes you say that?

In terms of number of children, and going way back now to the 15th/16th centuries, I found it interesting looking at the number of children aristocratic/landed gentry families had versus length of the marriage. A surprising number seem to have “only” had 4/5/6 children, with one or two infant deaths, in rapid succession, in relatively long marriages. Obviously there were some who had enormous broods of 8+ with a fair few child losses but these seem to be less common.

With all the infant births and deaths recorded, how would a birth rate only slightly higher than now be explained. At he time the country was Catholic. Given all the extra marital goings on, it can’t that people simply “thought about sex differently”.

I always wonder how introverts handled the community spirited days, people coming in and out of your house all day and night must have been exhausting

There would probably have been less one to one though, less need to carry the conversation. I would still have hated it though

No idea! My grandmother was one of 13! As the oldest she did help bring up her siblings and 2 died before adulthood. I've seen the house, it's tiny - 2 double rooms and a box room. They definitely had different standards and expectations.

Given all the extra marital goings on, it can’t that people simply “thought about sex differently”.

The Church held a lot of power in the 15/16th century and it's ways were pretty much entrenched in daily life.

Sex was for marriage and procreation, obviously sex outside of marriage did happen but the penalities were fairly severe (e.g., public flogging). Within marriage there were restrictions. It was forbidden by the Church to have sex during Lent, Advent, feast days, fast days, Sundays, Wednesdays, Saturdays, while pregnant and while breastfeeding. "Fornication" was also one of the ways in which the Devil could tempt you over to the dark side so too much of it was considered bad for your soul. Once a week, missionary style was the prescribed "right amount". Add in the facts too that periods wouldn't have been as regular as they are now due to breastfeeding, differences in nutrition, etc and that bedrooms weren't private rooms for the use of just one person/one couple and you get a scenario where the odds of having sex at the same time as ovulation occuring are relatively low.

My gran looked down on men who had lots of children and used to say the men should leave their wives alone.

My gran looked down on men who had lots of children and used to say the men should leave their wives alone

I have four DC. I was out with all of them and got talking to an old lady, she told me she had four DC too but they're all in their 60s now so would have been the 1950s when she was raising them? She said that her husband was in the navy and would be away for months at a time. Every time he came home on leave, she would have a baby nine months later and ended up having four DC in the space of four years! She said after the fourth one was born her doctor told her "next time your husband is on leave, send him to see me" so she did. Husband went to see the doctor and was totally told off! The doctor told him that his wife had more than done her duty by him and that he should "do the decent thing and stop bothering her!" She said they didn't have 'relations' again until the 60s when the Pill became available (for married women only) and she went on it.

meow because having a baby at 55 without fertility treatment is vanishingly rare. But in days gone by, babies born to unmarried teenagers were routinely passed off as belonging to the mother to avoid the scandal and keep the baby in the family. Seriously, look up statistics for babies born to 55 year olds. Sounds like your family were very kind and supportive.

@MiGi777 I was born in the mid 60's into a working class Yorkshire family, my maternal grandfather was a miner, paternal a farmer. It wasn't until I was 7 years old that we had an indoor bathroom. The toilet was outside, the tin bath was hung on the back of the pantry door and my mother had an old wash tub and wringer in the outhouse. Nothing unusual about that where we came from.

I really really want to know where MidniteScribbler’s island is!

I think that people parented in a different way - no guilt if you did not sit and read to them, do craft activities/jigsaws, take them out to Play Planet, dance lessons, gym etc. You just gave them breakfast and poked them out of the door to fettle for themselves, make up their own games, meet their mates.

Oh - and the children had chores to complete.

I agree that the lady who had her last baby at 55 probably took on the illegitimate child of an unmarried daughter. From what I understand it wasn’t uncommon. (And better than her being disowned or sent off to a mother and baby home for the child to be forcibly adopted.)

Me too @lottielady!

I always wonder how introverts handled the community spirited days, people coming in and out of your house all day and night must have been exhausting.

If they didn't "believe" in shell shock after WW1, you can bet being an introvert wasn't a thing back then (even if it actually was).

But I genuinely think people would have been too focussed on physical survival and just getting through life to worry about emotional or mental health. There was no time or space for social anxiety. At worst you might have been considered "crippingly shy". Also, as a PP said, with half the village in your front room, perhaps you could just slope off unnoticed!

I agree that the lady who had her last baby at 55 probably took on the illegitimate child of an unmarried daughter. From what I understand it wasn’t uncommon. (And better than her being disowned or sent off to a mother and baby home for the child to be forcibly adopted.)

Yes, there's an uncle in our family (born shortly after WW2) and to this day no one is sure if he's actually a cousin...

I am the eldest of 8 and I helped bring up some my younger siblings along with my sister who is a year younger.

Having done this, it’s one of the main reasons I don’t have children of my own as I’ve already in my view ‘raised children’

From what I've heard about my ancestors, some of whom were miners, it sounded very tough. A father and son were killed in a mining accident, a young woman who was very intelligent had to leave school and go to pick up bits of coal off the slag heaps. They didn't have enough food. The kids didn't have shoes or clothes that fitted them. It really upsets me to think they lived like this. There was more of a community spirit, maybe because families didn't live so far from each other and people didn't move around the country as much as they do now. I think children took on a lot more responsibility and helped around the house and looked after younger siblings in a way which is very different to now. Kids were expected to go out to work, not study. A lot of people died younger from illness and in childbirth than now. Suicide was a crime so people were probably very afraid of admitting they had MH issues. People with illnesses and disabilities could have found themselves in lunatic asylums rather than being treated and being able to live supported normal lives as they can now. I couldn't have coped with life then, but maybe that's only because I have something else to compare it to.

It shouldn't be underestimated how many women died agonising deaths in childbirth in years gone by, and how many babies were sadly stillborn.

If it weren't for modern medicine I'd have died in childbirth and so would my eldest daughter (severe shoulder dystocia meaning she was stuck behind my pelvis plus a bad PPH) In fact, so would my mother (severe PPH both births), my aunt (another stuck baby) and my cousin (same, stuck baby and PPH) We don't give birth easy in my family. DHs sister was also born in the 80s by emergency CS under GA as each contraction was strangling her because the cord was wrapped round her neck several times. She'd have been a goner too, it was only picked up because of a switched on consultant who used a portable scanner after checking unusual readings on a monitor.

Out of my close circle of friends, you have me, another who had placenta praevia (another potentially fatal condition) and required a CS, another who had severe pre-eclampsia and so has a CS. Only one of the four of us has had straightforward, natural births and even she had gestational diabetes which wouldn't have been picked up many years ago.

Childbirth is relatively safe these days but it years gone by many many women died horribly because of it. The lack of birth control, and the culture that women were supposed to service their husbands even if they didn't want to also meant that they couldn't prevent pregnancies even if they were life threatening to them.

Op you described my mum's life in your op, she had more than 12 children and had to cope on her own. She had no parents, no siblings, no one to help her at all. My dad wasn't a miner but he was a manual worker and didn't lift a finger in the house. I think my mum had a pretty miserable time of it, she worked her arse off in the home and never got any recognition or encouragement. It's easy to say life was simpler then and romanticize it but they both worked so hard just to provide the bare necessities. I wouldn't go back to those times for anything.

I have a bit of an obsessive interest in what sex was like for women pre birth control and often in ignorance. What must it have been like on your ‘wedding night’ when often women and often the men, had no idea what sex involved? My mother admitted to me that she was virtually ignorant in the early 1960’s despite being a nurse! She didn’t know how ‘babies were made’.
Her grandmother was insistent that her daughters not be told anything about the ‘facts of life’.
If you were married to a man who wasn’t considerate , or a wife beater or drunk, it must have been absolutely horrendous.
My grandmother in law had four children with an emotionally abusive husband who was much older. She said she hated ‘that upstairs business ‘. Her own mother had vanished when she was young and she was shipped from Australia to Britain with her sister to live with a maiden aunt. Unaccompanied!

Another really good book on this subject is " Round about a pound a week" by Maude Pember Reeves. Written in 1910, it's a study of working class women's lives.
Very humbling

Round About A Pound A Week (Virago reprint library) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0860680665/ref=cmswwrcppapiii_zRSACbNMH9JBY

On the subject of labour and maternal death (specifically to do with women suffering from rickets, which apparently causes deformation of the pelvis and makes vaginal delivery a lot more difficult, if not impossible) , this is from Call the Midwife:

It will never be known how many women died of exhaustion in the agony of obstructed labour: the poor were expendable, and their numbers not counted. Where was it I had read, in some ancient manual for the Instruction of Women attending the Lying-in: “If a woman is in labour for more than ten or twelve days, you should seek a doctor’s aid”?

I mean, bloody hell. 10 or 12 days?! But more than that - no one knows, because nobody cared enough to count them.

My mum had a post-partum haemorrhage that would have been the end of her if she hadn't had access to medical care, and my sister was in latent labour for a week and ended up with a forceps delivery. And two women I know from antenatal / baby groups ended up having a crash c-section, neither of them would have made it otherwise.