how did women cope with their wedding night in the days before they were taught about the birds + the bees?

Question

did their mums tell them what was going to happen or what?

Answer 1

I believe many of them learned from their new husbands. Hence alot of crying and confusion. Girls in the old days didn't like sex.

Answer 2

Women were always taught what to expect as they grew up, usually by another, possibly older, woman. My mother was an orphan, and when she was 12, her dad asked a neighbour to tell her and her sister the "facts of life."

Ordinary people usually knew about sex from experience BEFORE they got married. You may have been reading too many Victorian novels. They are not really true to life, and they mostly deal with young ladies. But even in Jane Austen books, there is sex outside marriage(though of course, not for good girls).

Answer 3

Although most history you read would like you to think otherwise, most people had a pretty good idea what would happen on their wedding night. First of all because most people were around animals and had seen sex between them, and secondly because there wasn't as much privacy as there is now. There were very few women who had not been exposed to either people or animals and those who hadn't usually had some kind of explaination from either a mother, servant, or from a priest or preacher of some kind.

Answer 4

the part was that men weren't taught to go easy and be gentle with a woman. So the women usually got the surprise of thier life!!

pretty rough.

Answer 5

Maybe it just "happens"...i know that in certain cultures, they still prefer not to tell the children about the birds and the bees...maybe it still happens today!

Answer 6

my nana knew nothing. she told me on her wedding night my grandad came to her and she was petrified. she never enjoyed it, she had my mum, no one had told her what to expect, she had a 3 day labour with no pain relief, my mum was stuck as she was a huge baby.
My nan was torn and in bed for a month to heal, then the war came, he went to war, he was a POW for 7 years poor chap, and she was alone again, but she was free of the sex but had to deal with the bombs.
He came back, had my uncle.
I remember her asking me about sex when she was in her 80's, imagine, explaining it all to your grandmother, about orgasms and such, and that it wasn't a horrible thing, and she wished she had been told things but she grew up in a time of oppression and ignorance for women in Scotland, and she had a hard life.
I miss her she was my real mum.
so really it was rape within marriage contract and expected, aren't we lucky today girls in that respect?

Answer 7

There mothers would take them aside and have a quiet word, but to believe that the "olde dayes" were an age of innocence [sic] is naivety itself.

Answer 8

I think it was all learned behavior. Moms back then didn't want to talk to their daughters back then about it....it was taboo.

I think the husbands showed the women what to do....or just did it.

Answer 9

there mothers told them to lie back and let the husband have his way as it was her wifely duty, she was told there was no pleasure in it for a woman, and any woman that did feel any pleasure was considered a 'loose' girl

Answer 10

They lay back and thought of England.