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They waited until the kids fell asleep, then you can avoid the children hearing. Until one wakes in the night, and experiences trauma that resurfaces years later, and only Jedediah Brown, Frontier Psychologist can fix it.
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My grandfather- the one who grew up in a family of 15 children- said when I asked him about taking baths with lots of sisters and brothers around, but I’m sure it’s true of sex as well- that “if you wanted privacy you closed your eyes and made believe nobody else was there”.
Considering ancestors having sex is a bit gruesome, not because they were my ancestors but because of the mechanics. I mentioned before that walking through Alabama cemeteries while doing genealogy research I started noticing and then actually taking note of the birthdates prior to the mid 20th century (when air conditioning became more common and farming less common) that there’s a plunge of birthdates in the Spring months- i.e. the months where the babies would have been conceived in summer. There’s lots of summer births (winter conceptions) and a fair number of babes who would have been spring and fall conceptions, but I’ll bet if a study were done you’d find less than 10% of the babies were conceived in summer months. Here in Alabama where 100 degree heat index with near 100% humidity isn’t that uncommon and if you’re a man you’re working outside in a field and if you’re a woman you’re working in an airless house with a fire going and tending to a bunch of rug rats (and sometimes outside in the field as well) and there’s no such thing as running water and bathing involves a bucket of water and a rag, the last thing you’d feel at night is romantic. (I would guess that the rich who didn’t do as much manual labor conceived more children in summer than lower classes, but even so 100 degrees is 100 degrees and no anti-perspirant is no-anti perspirant).
Add to this the lack of privacy mentioned above and it’s even more “ewww”. I would imagine oral sex was very rare among married couples due to the lack of hygiene; it’s still something that older southern women are disgusted by the concept of judging by the ones I heard voice opinions during Lewinskygate.
Add to this the fact that 6 pack abs meant you were starving and there was little or no skin care that didn’t involve grease and wishful thinking. Can you imagine the body of a woman who had borne 8 children all while working very hard to manage a house and in an age before any kind of quality skin care or exercise regimen was affordable or really worked? And yet she might have 8 more kids before she was finished, so their husbands still found them at least somewhat appealing. (I wonder what the tan lines were like for farmers when they took their clothes off, not that most did all the way; there were many couples who were married for generations and had umpteen kids who never saw each other completely naked.)
Our recent ancestors had very different sleep patterns from us. Most went to bed very soon after sunset and woke around sunrise, meaning that they actually got more “bed time” than we do, BUT I have read that many woke in the middle of the night at that time and often got out of bed, ate a snack, relieved themselves, maybe read a book or whatever for an hour or two and then went back to bed so they weren’t really getting more sleep. I would imagine a lot of babes were conceived in the 1 a.m. “long night intermission” time when the house was quieter, darker, the children were asleep, and the room was cooler.
I suspect they were. When we lived in the Congo my father’s UN per diem (not even his salary) made us relatively rich, and we had a servant. Not one who slept in the house or did the things we mentioned, but one who cooked and cleaned. a well-off woman back then would not expect to have to cook or, worse, clean up. Before social security and the minimum wage it was very affordable, given income disparity and the number of single women in the labor force who would not have had the opportunities for employment they do today.
My husband and I have separate bedrooms (and bathrooms.) It doesn’t hinder sexual activity or cuddling or anything like that one bit. But it sure does make for a good night’s sleep.
Oops, hit submit too soon. Meant to add - One of my cousins (married to her HS sweetheart for 20 years now) also has the same sleeping arrangement, and my mother and her boyfriend of 20+ years have entirely separate living spaces. She owns a 3 family home and lives in the main level of the house, while he lives in the apartment upstairs. They couldn’t be happier.
Oops, hit submit too soon. Meant to add - One of my cousins (married to her HS sweetheart for 20 years now) also has the same sleeping arrangement, and my mother and her boyfriend of 20+ years have entirely separate living spaces. She owns a 3 family home and lives in the main level of the house, while he lives in the apartment upstairs. They couldn’t be happier.
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Reminds of Katharine Hepburn when she was talking about her long affair with Spencer Tracy. Somebody asked if the reason they never lived together was because of the need to keep it secret and she responded that no, it was an open secret already and there were other celebrities who had live-in relationships (Laurence Olivier & Vivien Leigh were fairly openly living together when she was the most talked about actress in the world during GWTW publicity blitz and it was kept out of the press, this being in the contract days when the studios took an interest in star’s privacy). She said it was because she loved Spencer but there was no way in hell they could have lived together or, had he been divorced, that they would have been able to marry and make it work; it would have ended their relationship in a week if not sooner. He had his place- a fairly modest bungalow, she had hers, and they’d meet at one or the other (usually his) and sometimes travel together but they’d always return- by choice- to their separate residences. (Mrs. Tracy and children lived in a third home that was Spencer’s ‘official’ residence [the one they showed on the Movie Star’s Homes maps and tours] but he rarely spent the night there; she and Katharine Hepburn met for the first time when Spencer died.)
Both my maternal and paternal grandparents had separate bedrooms.
My mother’s parents slept separately because my grandfather got up very early to work (he loved working and never stopped until he died), and didn’t want to wake my grandmother.
My father’s parents slept in separate rooms because, like most sane and intelligent people, he couldn’t stand my grandmother. Divorce was never an option for reasons that are still unclear to me.
I don’t sleep with my wife because I snore and also because of the fact that I like sleeping alone. Now, I love laying in bed with her and doing whatever, but sleeping, I want to do alone in my own bedroom where I can snore, fart and roll around all that I please.
None of my ancestors (to my knowledge, anyway) had seperate bedrooms, but maybe it was different in the Deep South, even among fairly well-to-do families (and some of my ancestors were fairly well-off, before the Civil War). In the present day, I have only known one couple who had seperate beds, and that’s because the husband snored like a foghorn. I suggested to him that he get checked for septum problems, but he said they didn’t like to go to the doctor. I couldn’t imagine sleeping apart from my husband before sending him to the doctor for help with snoring! BTW, this couple has plenty of money, at least enough to get his septum checked.
My husband and I have very different needs when it comes to mattress firmness. He likes a soft mattress, whereas I need something that’s nearly as firm as a board with a thick quilt on it. We sleep in separate beds, and if I sleep on his mattress or he sleeps on mine for some reason, the one of us who has slept on the wrong mattress wakes up with a horrid backache that just won’t go away. Now, we could put two twin beds of different firmness in the same room…but he has to get up and ready for work before 6 AM, on most weekdays. And I stay up most of the night. If we slept in the same room, we’d be constantly waking each other up. And let me tell you, that does NOT make for a happy marriage.
Sampiro, that’s an interesting idea. I imagine my ancestors in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana didn’t want to be touched for about three months out of the year. I did the math up for my ancestors Henry BLACKWELL and his wife Elizabeth KEENER’s family, since they had eleven children with known birthdates and that seems like a good data pool. This family lived in Etowah co. AL.
John was born May 24, 1870 = conceived in late August or early September.
Volera was born August 7, 1871 = conceived sometime mid-November.
Viola was born February 27, 1873 = conceived early June.
Leavada born August 11, 1878 = conceived mid-November.
Danie was born January 15, 1879 = conceived mid-to-late April.
Henry was born January 10, 1881 = conceived mid-April.
Una Leora was born November 8, 1882 = conceived mid-February.
Vann Washington was born July 27, 1885 = conceived early November.
Alice, born November 8, 1887 = conceived mid-February.
Ida, born 1889 = conception unknown.
Earl, born June 4, 1890 = conceived mid-September.
Clibern, born March 21, 1898 = conceived late June/early July.
So they had two conceived in the summer months of June-July, and one conceived in late August (probably about when it starts to cool off in northern Alabama). The rest were all conceived in the winter or spring.
Very true. My grandmother once told me that she never saw my grandfather naked–despite a very happy love life. He was very modest and so it was always dark.
My brother and his wife sleep in separate bedrooms. My brother has a horrible snore. I’ve shared a hotel room with him a couple of times and I can testify that you wouldn’t want to sleep even in an adjacent room if you have a choice.
I know another couple where the husband sleeps on the couch, but that is because he goes to sleep very late and she gets up early.
Several ancient societies had huge orgy festivals in the spring and it’s believed a reason may have been to cause as many pregnancies as possible since winter was the most convenient time to give birth. I doubt Alabama had many, at least before the Iron Bowl.
Actually, I was at 7 months and having issues with toxemia in August, in what was basically the hottest week of the year in an apartment with no air conditioning … I found myself in the basement lying on cement to suck as much heat out of me as I could [then I got admitted to a wonderfully cold air conditioned hospital]
I can see not wanting to be end stage pregnancy in the summer, that was fucking purgatorial. Not to mention post harvest the main stuff to do for farmer types was to repair the equipment and care for the breeding stock, so it is the perfect time to have to deal with a newborn.
My grandparents had separate rooms – my grandfather snores like a chainsaw. As soon as my dad moved out, my grandfather moved into his room. (Even when my grandparents shared a room, there were nights when my gramma had slept on the couch, according to my aunt)
I’d like to see a cite for this. The whole idea that “Victorians were uptight prudes” is something of a stereotype.
I think the answer to the OP is that marriages at that time and that economic level were as likely as not to be convenient arrangements and not expressions of abiding love. The wives were there to play the social role of the wife and be baby factories, not to be soul mates or snuggle mates. Those marriages were often not emotionally close or romantic. They weren’t “in love.” The guy probably still had a peice or two on the side, and sometimes they were the ones he really loved.
When touring the ‘cottages’ in Newport, Rhode Island (vacation homes of the super-wealthy built during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), some of the tour guides explained the separate bedrooms by pointing out the sitting room that was part of the lady’s room. It was apparently customary for her to receive friends and casual visitors in her bedroom, which would have been awkward if her husband also needed to dress in there (in an era when they might have changed clothes 3-5 times daily). Probably the idea of using it as a visiting room came after people began to use separate bedrooms, but it would have reinforced it.