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?

One thing to take away from this thread is the "luxury" of women being allowed to inform each other of the realities of our biology. We did not always have it, in fact it's very recent. Damned if I'm letting some bloke take it away from any young girls I know.

I think our danger now is that the only people who can actually remember life before the welfare state are in their 80s and older. So those in positions of power have no memory of what it was like when medical treatment was hard to come by, or an industrial accident could throw you and your family into destitution

^ THIS - with bells on. All those people going on about how awful the NHS is need to read some social history - it may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better than anything that came before it..!

@showerpower - thank you for the link. Fascinating viewing.

You can use the same analogy for anti vaxxers Seamstress.

I am old enough to remember seeing children in leg irons as a result of polio. I had measles as a child and have crap eyesight and damaged hearing.

At the beginning of the Victorian era fifty percent of children died before the age of five, and of those that survived, at least half of them had lost one ( or both) parents by the age of eight.
I don’t think parents coped any better with thirteen children then than a parent would cope with thirteen children now. I just don’t think they had a choice.
I always remember my old boss telling me the story of his great grandmother who was dragged away from Waterloo bridge in the 1890’s , about to throw herself into the Thames after discovering that she was pregnant for the thirteenth time.

Infant/child mortality wasn't 50% across the board in the Victorian area, it was as high as 33% in some areas (e.g., slums) but 50% is overstating it a bit. Same for orphaned children, a surgery conducted in 1861 stated that 11% of children had lost one parent by the age of 10 and around 1-2% had lost both.

*survey

Still high by today's standards though

A way to discovering what life was like would be to research your family tree using the available censuses which the Victorians had taken every 10 years. While doing that you will find families living near your own ancestors.

You do not even have to go very far back. In the 1960's, for instance they were building new estates without telephone cables or garages because very few people had telephones or cars and it was not thought necessary. Shut your car away out of temptation and walk everywhere. New housing estates made headline news on local newspapers when the first ones were built with central heating - well into the 1960's. Lock up your car, phones, tv's, washing machine, fridge, and computers and see how long you can manage without them, but you will find that without the need to go everywhere and do so much electronically you will find time to set fires to heat the water in the boiler to fill the tin bath hanging on the wall and do the washing. Toys were simple wood and plastic so there was very danger of children begging for the latest games etc. so your money might go further. You will have time for all sorts of things you don't like doing . If you do, I guarantee you will never wonder how people managed before........................

I was recently reading the "my naughty little sister" books from the 1950s and there was one story where the preschool-aged sister is left in the care of her father, who gets bored after about an hour and goes inside to work leaving her shut out in the garden crying, forgets about her and doesn't give her any lunch, and when the mother comes home at tea-time she has vanished and they all have to go down the street searching to eventually find the child in the care of a local shopkeeper.The mother says "I expect he has lost that little girl" when she gets back and sees the dad "as she knows both her husband and her daughter" but seems only mildly concerned.

So, yeah, it appears they didn't actually "cope" by today's standards, where that would be quite shocking lack of duty-of-care.

I've read that to my DD, Best and thought exactly the same!

My mother, a nurse in the 1930s and through the war, said that by far her worst experience was nursing whole families dying of diphtheria - worse than being bombed in both Liverpool and Gloucester. Later, in the 50s, she lived with a bad prolapse for far too long before treatment, this despite being the wife of a doctor.

Whoever recommended 'Down the common'(medieval woman) thank you, finished it last night and really enjoyed the snapshot into medieval life.

Back in the times of the reign of natural selection, people were a lot tougher. Only the tough ones survived and they were titans compared to the modern human, who is weak, feeble minded and spoilt. This, of course, is an exaggeration but there's a lot of sense in it.

My great-grandmother died aged 49, of 'exhaustion' the day after my grandmother got married. By this time she had given birth to 19 children, 10 of whom were still living at that time.

When I think of both my grandmothers living in terraced 2 up/2 down houses and only one tap to serve the whole house. In the kitchen and cold. No water heater, all hot water to be boiled up on a cranky iron range.

AND the ubiquitous outside loo at the end of the yard.

Ye Gods!

Wow. I love to read all of those stories about your grand and greatgrand parents. I love hearing about former times.

Hanuman that sounds terrible. We probably couldn't even imagine what her life had been like to die of exhaustion at 49 just from the hardship of day to day life. Unbelievable :(

I suspect that a lot of the 'exhaustion' deaths were from malnutrition/vitamin deficiencies, particularly where the woman had experienced multiple pregnancies and miscarriages.

Untreated inflammatory diseases can also result in early death - and there wouldn't have been anywhere near as a many post mortems to reveal cardiomyopathies as a result. The symptoms of uncontrolled inflammation include exhaustion, after all.

Lonicera how very right you are. In the early books of the Bible - Deuteronomy for example, there were precise instructions given to keep infections in some sort of control, but because centuries ago they were thought to be only religious rituals only churchmen read them. In fact they were written as ritual rules because they would not have been obeyed otherwise.

Only in Victorian times was there compulsory education. It is my belief that if the rules about cross infection had been taken out of the religious concept we may have been able to avoid a lot of infection. When you think of the shortage of penicillin as recent as the 1950's when only hospitals were allowed to administer it it is easy to imagine the suffering which went on, mainly due to ignorance. Also, social studies of the post war period show the ignorance of vitamins and how they worked. Into the 1960's there was very little knowledge of the value of them. a,b,c,d vitamins were known then and so was vit. E but they did not know until fairly recently that it is useful for people with neuropathy.

Expectations were lower. Much lower. You were also much less aware of things other people had, that you didn't (no Internet, TV advertising, phones etc.)

Although I do think people wore out younger and died much earlier.

My mum was born in rural Canada and lived in a log cabin her parents built. They grew their own veg and harvested their own meat (chicken and goat mostly). She rarely complains about life now!

First house I owned had an outside loo and no hot water or heating system. We installed a bathroom and hot water ourselves. That's what people did in the 70s.

People today have higher expectations.

I don’t think people will be putting their feet up and having robots clean their houses in 100 years time.

I think there’ll be a global environmental crisis and civilisation will be disintegrating. And people who live a subsistence sort of lifestyle, growing their own food etc may well be the ones who survive, while us soft people in the west perish.

Social media has created so much discontent and envy. People are not happy with their lot at all. The grass is so much greener on the other side.

I feel old saying this but teens seem to think that everyone is having a better time than them and if they're not in a tropical location surrounded by friends and drinks they're not living.

My grandmother had it tough in India but didn't mention it unless we asked her about it and deduced from what she told us that life was tough. She seemed to have just accepted it.

My gran would be 110 by now, but I do remember her.
She said the children had nothing, very few clothes, suits were worn in a weekend .. then porned on a Monday to feed everyone,. Since a man could not go out drinking without a suit, he gave his wife money to collect it Saturday morning
Had they not porned it they would have had no money for food.
My gran took jobs involving food, as she got perks of left overs....
A downstairs room and upstairs bedroom.
She always loved her flushing loo and her bath, and the washing machine my dad got her, was called washy. .

Funny as she had a front room no one ever used ...