Yes, and in those days all or many of the children would bathe together.
This is my thinking. While it’s impossible to be perfectly silent having sex, you can certainly be a lot more quiet than the OP’s supposition. If breathing and sheet-rustling are the loudest sounds, you’re not going to wake the kids up.
I avoided the dorms in college, but it was apparently quite common to sneak a boyfriend/girlfriend into the room at night and have sex without waking up the roommate.
I would also think that people may have had sex at other times of the day. If you live and work on a farm, it’s a pretty simple thing to kick the kids out to go play and do chores, buying you some uninterrupted time. Or you ditch the kids in the house and make use of the barn/shed/whatever.
What really blows my mind is the modern idea that children will somehow be irrevocably damaged by the knowledge that their parents are having sex. I doubt anyone ever thought wild, porn-style sex in front of the kids was good, but I think we’re at an unhealthy extreme nowadays.
I doubt this. Throughout this entire period, in the slums of Victorian England, the sod houses of the American Midwest, and the tenements of immigrants, we’re talking about multiple families or multiple generations living in a single room. Many, perhaps most, farms had no barns, and the animals lived in with the people. And this was true in most towns and cities. There was no getting away from others. Men were in the fields all day with the possible exception of meals and barns and sheds were cold and dirty. You had sex in your bed, with maybe a blanket hanging between you and the world.
This I agree with. If you told people of that era that children should not be exposed to any sexual image of any kind before they turned 18 they would have thought you were insane.
“…Whole families crowded into one or two beds and surrounded themselves with livestock in order to keep warm. So children became participant observers of their parent’s sex lives. No one thought of them as innocent creatures or of childhood itself as a distinct phase of life, clearly distinguished from adolescence, youth, and adulthood by special styles of dress and behavior. Children labored alongside their parents almost as soon as they could walk, and they joined the adult labor force as farm hands, servants and apprentices as soon as they reached their teens.”
A passage describing the lives of 18th century French peasants from The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History by Robert Darnton ( 1985, Vintage Books ).
So to answer the OP - privacy essentially didn’t exist for poor rural folk, at least in this milieu and I imagine it was similar elsewhere. Parents may have waited until later hours to have sex, but I doubt there was much secret about what was going on in such close quarters.
I live in Brittany (in France) and they used to have “closed-beds” Box-bed - Wikipedia .
So in that case I guess you only have to worry about sounds.
As for me, at one point I lived for months in a 200 sq ft flat, we were usually 4 people sleeping in the same room, at most we were 6, and for sex me and my partner waited/hoped for people to be asleep and we did it rather quickly, silently and did more simple stuff than what you can do when you have a lot more room and privacy.
Last year we were being shown round some preserved Victorian “back-to-back” houses in Birmingham. They had just had two bedrooms. The girls slept in the same room with their parents, and the boys in the other room. The guide told us that the only “private time” for the parents was when all the children were sent off to Sunday School for a couple of hours. Of course for the other six days of the week the father would be out at work when the kids were attending ordinary school.