And kids never looked through curtains? People were completely silent? The curtains didn’t crack open a bit?
You’re beginning from the premise that people didn’t really care if their kids saw them having sex, which is circular. If they cared about it, then they made sure to be shielded and to be quiet etc.
It’s likely that in more conservative societies people didn’t have sex with such wild abandon as they might today, and since couples slept in the same bed anyway, it might not have been apparent what was going on even if a kid accidently caught a glimpse.
Beyond that, the original claim was that kids saw it because “Sex was never hidden away, except for the tiny percentage of the aristocracy and upper middle classes”. You’re now speculating that it might have accidently been viewed on occasion. That’s a much lesser claim.
In order for people to decide to hide it, it has to first be possible to hide it.
And why would people in conservative cultures have sex less often? That’s a truly bizarre claim.
Sounds strange to me too.
If someone makes this claim let me know.
If you take a tour of the Isle of Lewis and Harris, there’s a few spots where you can see the old stone and thatch cottages. The walls were maybe 5 feet high, dirt floors, the whole thing divided into two rooms - one for the animals and one for the people. In a setup like this, people did not have the money for frivolous things like bed curtains. Any extra cloth probably went to use as additional blankets. It all depends on relative wealth - if all the family has is a single room, odds are they don’t have individual beds or frames with curtains around them.
I remember someone discussing crowded life in places like China and Japan, and basically it was - everyone did things, everyone else knew they did or probably did, but nobody discussed it; so generally privacy consisted of not doing things blatantly “in your face” and a sort of willful blindness. Presumably the same applied in Europe in crowded conditions.
I got CD copies of the parish registers for the area of England where my family was from; I found it amazing, considering our view of puritanical/Victorian England, that a large number of my ancestors and their siblings appear to have had the first child only a few months after getting married. I’m not sure what the dynamic is - “they had to get married”, or simply they cohabitated and found it a good idea to make it official with the first one on the way. (There’s also a dynamic about Church of England vs. other sects. For example, one ancestor in the late 1700’s her whole family except the father - so mother and 5 children - were baptized on the same day. Presumably after the father died…)
Also, contrary to expectations, a lot of my male ancestors waited until much later in life - 30’s, 40’s, even 50’s - to marry and start a family, often with a younger wife. I assumed this was due to some pressure to wait until they were the one running the family farm and could support a family.
In circumstances like this, curtains are not “frivolous”.
Common law marriage.
I would expect that these were second wives.
People tended to get married pretty young, but spousal death at early ages was also pretty common, and widow(er)s would get remarried.
There was a reason why the “respectable” working classes sent their children to Sunday school. The middle and upper classes had separate rooms, the unrespectable working and non-working classes didn’t care.
Not true. We’ve got this idea that people were married off in their teens in the olden days, but that was not the case. Teen marriage was not the norm in the Victorian Era, not even for women.
Neither of these cites make the point you imply they make.
I wasn’t talking about teen marriage. I was responding to someone who suggested that men commonly married in their “30’s, 40’s, even 50’s”. This is incorrect, as indicated by the cite helpfully provided by Darren Garrison.
Curtains around bed areas were frivolous when you needed all the cloth you could get for blankets and window coverings. When everything was hand-made, by your own hands, furniture and cloth goods were pretty rare. Even later, when people worked in the early Victorian factories, being able to buy many luxuries like furniture would have been rare. Only the rich had spare beds for guests and similar luxuries. Doubling up in beds was a common behavior. Google “bundling boards”.
Yes, that was my thought - the girl would move in, and once she was expecting, or shortly after the first one, they decided to make it official. (Father shows up with shotgun - “So, you going to marry my daughter or wot?”)
However, the registers list all (registered) marriages and births (well, actually Christenings - and occasionally list the birth date too) and the parents’ names. No indication of earlier wives or earlier children -basically, the men start late in general. There’s the occasional wording (i.e. listing only mother) that suggest some people entering the family tree were born completely out of wedlock.
No indication what they did to prevent having children too early…
Another interesting detail is that very large families, more than 3 or 4, combined with high infant mortality, seems to happen starting around 1800; possibly the infants who died were not recorded, but most children were baptized within 3 months, so infants who died within a a year should still be recorded.
Again, this is circular logic.
You ask an average person today if curtains are frivolous if the alternative is having sex in full view of other household members, and I assume we would agree most people would regard them as high priority, and on par with or higher than things like “blankets and window coverings”. (If you disagree with this then no further discussion is necessary.) You’re assuming that this was not true back in the day, and they would have considered such things frivolous. But that’s also your conclusion, which is therefore resting on itself.
And you’re assuming that they were shy about sex, which they must have been because they hid behind curtains, which they must have had because they were shy about sex.
OK, maybe I misinterpreted what you meant by “didn’t have sex with such wild abandon”. But whatever you meant by it, I can’t think of any way in which “having sex with wild abandon” is unconservative.
Incorrect. Perhaps you should review the thread.
I’m not trying to establish anything from the assumption that they hid behind curtains (or otherwise shielded themselves). Someone else tried to prove the opposite based on the notion that they couldn’t have possibly had any privacy at all, and I pointed out that this doesn’t hold.
My own assumption is based on the fact that prudery about having sex in view of other people is pretty widespread today across a variety of cultures, and the fact that pre-20th century people seemed if anything to be bigger prudes in other areas than are people today. So absent any actual evidence, I wouldn’t just accept such remarkable assertions at face value.
[I notice no one has even attempted to bring any actual evidence in support of this remarkable proposition, which you would think would be very much apparent if it were as widespread as people are claiming - this tends to support the notion that the whole idea is completely made up.]
Really?
How about being uncovered and/or with lights on versus under blankets and/or with lights off? How about noisier versus quieter? How about with a maximum of motion and different positions versus straight “missionary”? Etc. etc. This shouldn’t be hard.
The original context was the claim that even with curtains and such, other family members might accidently catch a glimpse. My response was and is that if it were done in a more conservative manner as oppose to with wild abandon, it would be less apparent even if accidently glimpsed.
What about any of that is less “conservative”?
:dubious: I’m skeptical about the second one (the relevant stat isn’t the average age of marriage, it’s the average age of FIRST marriage–plenty of folks remarried after a spouse died, and that should be taken into consideration). But the second one is remarkably on-point: if cloth is so insanely difficult to come by, it’s going to be prioritized to cover up nakedness, i.e., for clothing, rather than for bed curtains.
You might rescue the bed-curtain claim with some sort of evidence that they were commonly used, or that people hung up their shirts for a makeshift bed-curtain at night, or something like that. But in the total absence of any evidence that bed-curtains were common among poor folks in previous centuries, I don’t know why I’d believe that bed-curtains were common among poor folks in previous centuries.
I wasn’t talking about teen marriage. I was responding to someone who suggested that men commonly married in their “30’s, 40’s, even 50’s”. This is incorrect, as indicated by the cite helpfully provided by Darren Garrison.
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I think the term “conservative” applies to the types of attitudes and behaviors I described. But if you think it doesn’t, then OK but at least we’re clear now on what I meant. I’m not going to argue about dictionary definitions here.
You’re saying “bed curtains” because that term conjures up some sort of fancy poster bed, but it’s not a term I used. I said “curtains”. You could take some cloth and hang it as a curtain.
You’re saying people would prioritize clothing over covering up themselves having sex in view of others. Don’t know where you might get that from, but I don’t think it’s a valid assumption.
What you’re additionally losing sight of is that I’m not trying to prove anything, so I don’t need any evidence for anything. Others - apparently including you - think you can prove that people had sex in the open from the fact that they shared rooms. My point about curtains is that it would be reasonable to assume they used them or similar to shield themselves from view. So your proof doesn’t hold. If you want to prove something, you need evidence.
Interesting article on privacy. It makes the point that in one-room-home societies, folks often have sex out-of-doors. I wonder how that works in wintertime? It also mentions a society where, when parents want to have sex, they tell the kid to put his head under a mat.
Uh, no, that’s not why I’m using “bed curtains,” and it doesn’t conjure that image up for me at all. In this context, I’m imagining a curtain placed near a bed: the image in my mind is of a clotheslinish cord hanging from a bare wooden beam about a foot away from a straw mattress, with rough cloth hanging from it.
Really? You think there are people that prioritize a bed curtain over wearing clothes? For real? Because you prioritize one or the other.
Keep in mind, too, that artificial light was a luxury in the time period we’re discussing. It’d be real dark, and that might comprise sufficient privacy.