Firstly lostme children are entering puberty earlier.
Also I'm older than you, I suspect lot older.
I also have read about "the good old days" when there was much less sex education and a lot more morality.
It was not nice.
Even though I don't stretch back to Victorian days, this was a time when young girls, both black and white were sold as sex slaves, quite legally, unmarried mothers were locked up as mad, and "tolerance" for gay people had advanced to the stage where they would only be locked up for relatively short periods.
Women weren't allowed to own property, and there are still women alive who remember them getting the vote. Given that their role was to be skivvies and baby machines, no one was going to let them find out about contraception.
In my parents days, some women were told that having the baby would kill them. So the doctors did their best to make the mother comfortable whilst she and the baby died.
In your parents day knitting needles were involved, do I have to draw a diagram ?
I'd guess the average MNer is say 25-30, means her parents were 7 40-50 ish years ago, ie 1960s. Menstruation came as a deep and unpleasant shock to many girls, suicides from this were not unknown.