To think women had less choice about non consensual sex

[Leah2005]

Had a discussion with my DH last night starting with the fact that both our DGM's had more than 10 children each. I believe that women were less able to say no to their DH and frequently lay back and thought of England. That women were treated as chattel and with no other support, had to do as they were told. I'm not clear in my head when this started to change - I feel like the 1950's. Am I wrong? My DH was really upset by the conversation - I'm not sure if because I hold that belief or because it could have happened. I am aware that some women are still in this situation. Surely women with 10 kids in cramped housing conditions didn't think oooh I can't wait to have some sex? Or did they?

Mixture of feeling it was a wifely duty and lack of contraception I’d say

My grandparents were married between the wars and the only way they could space children was to avoid piv.

my Mil with her 6 kids - had to keep going until there was a boy... even though it was dangerous for her and she only wanted 2. So yeah, it's appalling and in some families probably still goes on.

Surely it changed a lot earlier than the 1950 with smaller families being far more common from the 1920s onwards. Prior to that, people had large families because of lack of contraception. Not only no contraceptive pill or injections but condoms were thick, expensive and re-usable, and the Dutch cap, greatly recommended by early birth control pioneers, notoriously unreliable.

Also forgot to mention abortion and sterilisation. Have 2 friends who were sterilised at 28 having each had 4 kids already.

Don't forget there were (long-term) benefits to mothers having multiple children to care for them in old age and to add to the family income once working. When we looked up our family history, my great great grandparents turned out to be farmers with 13 children, all of whom would have presumably been expected to labour on the farm for free.

Wasn't it the 70s when you could get the pill or diaphragm or whatever easily. Befor that, even if the sex wasn't non consensual you'd just end up pregnant once per year whether you liked it or not

No the pill was available from the 1960s and the diaphragm from the 1920s. Cheap disposable condoms probably made the biggest difference to family size. Large families definitely weren’t common in the 50s and 60s and were also somewhat frowned upon.

I think this is why you can't just put today's lens on yesterday's issues. Consent as we (thankfully) know it is very much tied up with a woman's right to choose and control pregnancy or not.

If you look at my greatgrandmother - she had something like 15 children (they didn't all survive childhood) and she died fairly young. She was a devout Catholic and thought every one a blessing.

My grandmother had two children - equally a devout Catholic so she stopped having sex after her two children were born because she didn't want more, but believed sex was for procreation rather than pleasure, so the solution was to stop the sex rather than the babies. (My grandfather's feelings about this are not on record!)

Now I can't know what their attitude to the act of sex itself was - whether they loved it or hated it - but I firmly believe they both had sexual agency in their lives.*

*disclaimer - I'm going by their stories of course and they might not have always been telling the truth.

One of my great aunties was seen within the family for being responsible for her ‘lovely’ husband leaving her because she refused sex after an awful experience of childbirth. The narrative from the other women was what could she expect and why would she expect to not have to have sex, why would she not expect it to cause discomfort or to result in unwanted pregnancies. While she was looked down on she appeared to me to be having a great time on her endless holidays with friends, her close relationship with her son and her busy working life. Expectations of older generations of women were low.

Your title is abhorrent. "Non consensual sex" is rape, not a type of sex. By its definition, there is no choice involved in rape.

Do you actually mean "AIBU to think women in the past were raped more frequently and had fewer protections from rape?"

My DH was really upset by the conversation

Was he not aware that it was legal for a man to rape his wife until the 1990s in the UK?

Was he not aware that legally women were chattels in the UK until relatively recently?

Unaware that married women's income was still treated as belonging to their husband for tax purposes in the 1980s? Married women have only had the right to control their income and be taxed as an individual person in the last 30 years.

Unaware of what was still happening to unmarried pregnant women right through the last century?

Unaware that women had no abortion rights until the 1960s and therefore died or lost their wombs and were imprisoned for trying to end a pregnancy?

Unaware that married women were not permitted to work in the Civil Service? Unaware that most women stopped working upon marriage as they were not permitted to continue employment as a married woman? It is only in the last few decades that it has been any kind of choice.

Unaware that it was legal to fire a woman for becoming pregnant until the 1990s?

Unaware that it was nigh on impossible to get a divorce even if their husband abused them? That the term "rule of thumb" refers to a man being allowed to beat his wife with a stick so long as it was not wider than his thumb?

Unaware that divorced women were not allowed to see their children? Children had no right to a relationship with their mother, even if she had been their primary carer?

Unaware that women were chattels owned by their father and that their marriage transferred ownership to their husband, hence the ceremony of the father delivering and passing the hand of his daughter to her new owner, the husband? Hence a woman's marriage vows including obedience to her husband?

Unaware of women being denied the vote and everything that meant?

Unaware of women being denied access to employment and equal pay, and therefore restricting their ability to achieve independence in order to have the chance to try and escape a rapist husband?

Unaware that beating one's wife was not a crime? That the police would do nothing to protect women being abused?

I guess if he had managed to reach the present day blissfully unaware of those things, then it must be an upsetting shock to learn the truth. Finding the truth confronting doesn't make it untrue though I'm afraid.

I find your view about women being raped and calmly "lying back thinking of England" naive and crass. Why do you think that women being raped in the past didn't find it as traumatic as women who are raped today?

Why do you think previous generations of abused women weren't damaged, distressed and living with PTSD?

@CecilyP

Wasn't it the 70s when you could get the pill or diaphragm or whatever easily. Befor that, even if the sex wasn't non consensual you'd just end up pregnant once per year whether you liked it or not

No the pill was available from the 1960s and the diaphragm from the 1920s. Cheap disposable condoms probably made the biggest difference to family size. Large families definitely weren’t common in the 50s and 60s and were also somewhat frowned upon.

*available to married women

My Nan was a virgin on her wedding night and has said she got the shock of her life. She was regularly beaten and abused by my grandfather who left her when she was 6 months pregnant with my mum. My friends and I have spoken about what it must have been like for some women and how we ourselves couldn't imagine lack of autonomy over our own lives (being forced to leave work when pregnant for example) and the domestic expectations.

I also feel deeply for women who had horrendous births with life changing injuries and were just expected to get on with it. After care in these situations is poor now and back then must have been awful. One of my aunts suffered horrendous post natal depression and when she went to her GP he asked if she had had sex yet - and that a good seeing too would "sort her out". Just appalling.

Also, if you read about convent histories many women became nuns as it was the only alternative to being married off to be raped and spend their lives pregnant. It wasn't about religious devotion for most.

ok, just a few bits of historical myth busting. Writing about women and sex refers to both sexes orgasming since basically we could write. Georgian porn writes huge amounts about cunnilingus and the wonders of the cunt that could shrink to grip any penis but expand to birth a child. Oral sex both ways is mentioned in everything from Chaucer to the Kama sutra, Roman graffiti and Japanese art. It was often believed in Western Europe that mutual orgasm was necessary for conception. What the victorians did really really well was cast their outward prudishness on subsequent generations views of both the Victorians themselves and the past. Yes marital rape was a thing but sex wasn’t just bleak rape from cave man to the 1960s!

@CecilyP women had to be married and they had to obtain their husbands consent and signature to obtain it back in the 60s.
If he said no, then she couldn't have it.
My late m.i.l had to take a consent form home from her GP for my f.i.l to sign for her to have it back in the 60s.
Fortunately he was one of the good men who didn't mistreat or abuse his wife and consented readily once he had spoken to the GP to ensure there was no risk to my m.i l health by taking it

1950's? No. I think Mc women probably started to be in a position to try and negotiate from mid 70's. It's always been harder for many Wc women, and non English backgrounds, because a large part of the purpose of a man marrying was to have housekeeping and sexual access on tap.

I was pushed into my marriage very young. Refusal certainly wasn't an option in my marriage including post childbirth. It was also quite normal for some women to have to go back for repeated restitching and infection control because of it in the 70's and 80's. The nurses and Dr's knew we weren't getting in that state because we wanted to.

If you were under 18 and in some situations 21, your 'D'h had to give permission for contraception. The idea of that actually happening is kind of laughable.

Even post divorce and (his) several remarriages, he believed he still had 'rights,' he was just on dodgier ground trying to enforce them. Right into the 2010's I was encountering police who found it 'understandable' that he should expect to be able to pick up what he'd discarded many years earlier, as 'he'd already been there hasn't he love?'

Please don't tear me apart for being honest here, because maybe women like me can help bridge gaps in the misunderstandings that some younger women have with their parents and IL's.

Although I cheered on younger women for demanding bodily autonomy, and kept my mouth shut about what I really thought, I'm afraid it was a long time before I could actually really understand the concept of rape within marriage. It seemed a total oxymoron, but I understood that I didn't necessarily need to understand to back younger women seeking change in their lives.

I totally get it now, and when I look back I understand why i didn't then. I'm just grateful that however dumb I may have been I never wanted the next generation to suffer things just because we thought it was normal.

On a side note....my Roman Catholic grandmother, a mother of 12, did inform me that 12 would have been many more if my grandfather wouldn't have ' shoved it up my arse ' to avoid even more pregnancies.
That made me spit my tea out!

My dm, now in her 80s is still enraged that after a very difficult birth (nearly lost her and my db) in 1976 my df had to sign his consent for her to be sterilised after being told that another pregancy would kill her. It still makes her so angry that the decision was not hers alone, after all, her life,her body etc.

for my df, because he is a kind and loving man there was no question of not signing, not all women would have been so 'lucky'!

@QualityMarguerite

One of my great aunties was seen within the family for being responsible for her ‘lovely’ husband leaving her because she refused sex after an awful experience of childbirth. The narrative from the other women was what could she expect and why would she expect to not have to have sex, why would she not expect it to cause discomfort or to result in unwanted pregnancies. While she was looked down on she appeared to me to be having a great time on her endless holidays with friends, her close relationship with her son and her busy working life. Expectations of older generations of women were low.

The narrative from the other women was what could she expect...

When you have no autonomy over your own life and are subjugated and abused with no way out because months structures of your society, you have to find a way to endure that suffering and survive.

Which is why women themselves adopted mindsets like that to try and make it tolerable. Unfortunately that then perpetuates the cycle and allows society to keep the structures that are trapping them in the first place.

You see the same thing with abuse victims/survivors today. Especially in the very sad cases where an abuse victim becomes an abuser because they have normalised it so much.

Another historical example would be ancient Greek women. Upon a marriage a woman joined the husband's household and may never see her mother again. There is recorded evidence of mothers treating daughters badly compared to sons, basically to avoid attachment and bonding to daughters as a way to protect themselves from the pain of losing them on their subsequent marriage.

But this then reinforces the status of women in society as inferior etc etc. None of these women were "bad" people, they were just very damaged by the abusive, misogynistic societies they were born into.

These kinds of attitudes and behaviours from women in patriarchal societies are actually a sign of how damaging the situation is, rather than that it is ok for women.

Never mind all the women who were so broken and traumatised by the abuse tolerated by our society that they were institutionalised, or kept permanently drugged up on sedatives/ tranquilisers / antidepressants etc.

I dare say there have always been women who enjoyed sex, as well as those who had to lie back and think of England.

A widowed friend of my student landlady (she’d have been in her 60s and this was decades ago) once told me that she’d never get married again, because, ‘I never did take to the upstairs work.’ 😂

Large families definitely weren’t common in the 50s and 60s and were also somewhat frowned upon.

Clearly that depends on place and class, and frowned upon by who? Those who thought their opinions on such things mattered?
Because there were tons of big families already in existence when I was born, and many more were breeding like rabbits despite desperate housing situations, especially Catholics, and specific races.

In the 60's child benefit was only paid on every second child, specifically to encourage replacing the lost war generation. If child no.2, 4, 6, 8 died, it didn't make financial sense to those on a low income, to not replace it.

Of course women were just as sexual

But with the fear of pregnancies, stds, majority having far more physical lives than ours, for majority not having privacy as we do now plus the idea from society nice women were not particularly sexual would have played a part doesn’t make it as easy for women to feel as up for having sex

The fear of pregnancies another hungry mouth to feed must have been absolutely draining

@CecilyP

Wasn't it the 70s when you could get the pill or diaphragm or whatever easily. Befor that, even if the sex wasn't non consensual you'd just end up pregnant once per year whether you liked it or not

No the pill was available from the 1960s and the diaphragm from the 1920s. Cheap disposable condoms probably made the biggest difference to family size. Large families definitely weren’t common in the 50s and 60s and were also somewhat frowned upon.

Yes. I was born in the early 60s, went to school 60s/70s, the vast majority of my school mates were from families of one or two children, three or more was really quite unusual.

The pill was widely available in the 60s hen e the sexual liberation. Condoms for centuries.
Large families were a source of pride 'filling the family pew' was a thing