Anyone watching 'The other Boleyn girl'??

[Italiangreyhound]

Seems like a pretty crap time to be a woman (or a girl)!

Anyone know how true it all is??

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Boleyn_Girl_%282008_film%29

I know :(
Her brother, who was only about 15 at the time killed himself by gassing himself in the oven.
He had been in constant pain his whole life and when they did the PM they found most of his organs were in the wrong side.
Poor poor boy.
Yeah...the 1950s were a golden time alright
I loathe programmes like heartbeat et al that try and "recapture" the glory of this great bygone era. When children died of whooping cough and measles and polio. And men could beat their wives and get no punishment. And when disabled people were "put away"
Happy days, eh?

Sorry...have brought the thread down somewhat....

No you haven't badvoc. Everything you say is true. My grandfather's mother died in the 1920s as a result of snorting her twelfth or thirteenth child with a knitting needle. She just couldn't cope with the idea of another mouth to feed.

bad, you haven't at all. For goodnesssake don't apologize, surely this is what this thread is there for!

Aborting

!!

Bloody autocorrect

I think if we looked at everyone's family history, we'd all have these stories and we'd all feel like porto. It is scary to think of it all.

I struggle with the fact that, even very recently, my grandmother was giving birth and the nurses left her alone and stopped her husband going in to see her. By the time the nurses went back, she had delivered her baby and the baby was dead. It is appalling to think of. Of course we're luckier now, and of course we need to remember what went wrong back then and try to do better.

My nan nursed a man after World War II. Married him. He was a widower with 2 children. She moved 100 of miles to live with him in the ex wife's family home. With her (the dead wife) parents. I think she must have really loved him to do this. They had a dd together then HE died. Presumably the family weren't sure what do for the best so they set her up with my grandad - dead wife's younger brother. They have been married for 60 odd years - mostly unhappily - but went on to have 3 more daughters. I think my nan had no choice either. She needed someone to support her, a widow with a baby. I don't think my grandad had a huge amount of choice in it either....

Yes.
My maternal GM had 17 children. (Irish catholic)
14 of them lived to adulthood which is amazing really.
She suffered from depression most of her adult life.
She had a neighbour who had 13 children and every one of them died before they were 3/4.
:(
I get the rage when people hark back to a "golden age".
I have noticed there is a lot of it about ATM what the anniversary of the queens coronation.

Sorry, I didn't mean to make you sad, just to say it is such a widespread thing and all of our mothers/grandmothers/female relatives we don't know of must have had similar experiences.

Blimey Porto. How sad.
:(
But....perhaps also very common at the time?
How many wartime marriages were true love matches?
How many were forced? How many were done on the spur of the moment and regretted for years afterward?
People got married, perhaps the woman got pg, the man was called up, and came back 3/4 years after to a child who didn't know who he was!?
That what happened to my mils mum. When her dad came home from the war she all edged,y turned to her mother sand said ;"mummy, who is that man?"
:(

I am so thankful that I live in an era of safe, free contraception and safe, free abortion.
And that young girls can now have their babies, and not be forcibly separated from them.
For all the idiotic talk about teenage pg (and lets face it, historically most of them were teenage ones!!) I am glad that girls get support and help with whatever they decide to do.

Agree Badvoc.
My granny gave her baby to her older sister to bring up. I believe she felt sad and guilty about it for the rest of her life, even though she later married my lovely grandad and had my mum. When she got Alzheimers she kept calling my mum by the name of her other baby.

badvoc - I've got to say (and I've been banging on about this on another thread so excuse me) ... we don't really live in an era of free safe abortion.

For some women in the UK, it is extremely hard to get an abortion. You have to find two doctors willing to sign off, and doctors can refuse. In some areas, the waiting list for NHS abortions is also very long. And a private abortion is expensive.

Even if you jump through all of those hurdles, it is not unlikely you will get no counselling (even though it's mandatory), and, of course, not abortion is perfectly safe. It's not: it's a medical procedure.

I'm not knocking abortion or the NHS. Both are brilliant. I'm just saying we have an inflated idea of how easy and safe it all is.

tunip that is appallingly sad.

Yes, very sad but so much better than it must have been for the majority of girls in her position, because at least it meant she was in touch with her daughter and she could come to stay with her. The daughter only found out about it during a teenage row with her mother. She said 'I wish my auntie was my mum' and the sister said 'Actually she is.'
My dad still doesn't know. I found out from a bit of paper stuffed into a photo album with a family tree on it, and I asked my mother about it and she said, 'Er, yes. Remember when you were 10 and I crashed the car? That was when I was a bit upset because I'd just found out my cousin was really my sister.'

Yes. I guess you are right :(
My gp was telling me that his tutor at college was a staunch pro lifer and because of him, for many years, hardly any women in Birmingham got an abortion.
according to my gp he called periods - get this - "the tears of a frustrated womb"
Ffs :(
Tunip...my GM gave her eldest child to her parents to "mind" after she was ill following the birth of her second child.
Except they wouldn't give her back :(

Oh, lord, it wasn't a 'right' or 'wrong' thing, just me being negative and depressed about reality.

That is really disturbing what your GP's tutor said. Ewww! And did he not understand basic biology?! I mean, how healthy would it be to be pregnant all the time.

There is so much that is so sad, though. I find it scary how this thread has become so personal and yet it completely fits.

I think it was very very common back then tunip.
And, as you say, they got to see their child and be involved to an extent.
I got chatting to a woman at the bus stop one day (I have one of those faces. People are always telling me their life story) she was in her 60s and had just found out she had a brother.
They even went to the same school.
Her mum had got pg young and been forced to give up her child.
:(

Yes. Those comments have stayed with me I have to say.
Don't you think that's what's so fascinating about history though!?
That it brings about some really unexpected revelations?
Perhaps there really is nothing new under the sun.

For me the interesting thing about history is them being exactly like us and completely different.
Their bodies and brains worked the same way (and in evolutionary terms 500 years is a blink of an eye) but culturally they were so very different.
Women's history, especially the love and sex and childbirth bits, brings us up against experiences that were exactly the same and yet meant such different things. It makes it easy to imagine yourself in their position, but it's a stretch to know how it would feel to, say, think your miscarriage is a sign from God that your marriage is illegitimate.

Yes, they were exactly like human beings, but so very different!

Tunip...ah...well...it depends which bit of the bible you read :)
And, of course, if the pope clement had agreed that the papal dispensation given to Henry and Catherine was invalid then the whole "the pope is infallible" thing sort of falls apart, doesn't it? :)

Anne Boleyn got exactly what she wanted. She played for high stakes, and she won, for a time. She was nobody's pawn.