“It’s Very Little I Know about the Facts of Life to This Day”: Speaking about the Silence Surrounding Sex

Our knowledge of American women’s experiences and understandings of sexuality in the past is limited by the reticence that surrounded the subject during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between the repression of public discussion of sex and birth control in the 1870s and the popularization of new ideas about female sexuality in the 1920s, sex was regarded as an “indecent” topic for respectable women to discuss, even in private, and the pornography that circulated underground was targeted at men. Despite feminist historians’ efforts to reconstruct the history of contraception, abortion, and other methods of limiting fertility, we know very little about the subjectivity of women for whom childbearing seemed an inevitable consequence of sexual relations and even less about those who entered marriage without knowing “the facts of life.”¹ Although some feminist historians initially presumed that women found this situation traumatic and burdensome, substituting inferences based on contemporary viewpoints for the voices of women themselves is ahistorical.² Our very premises differ: today we assume that women either had or were denied reproductive choices, while to some of these women the very possibility of making such decisions once seemed inconceivable.

This essay presents the voices and viewpoints of women in the transitional generation, who grew up when sex was unmentionable but lived through the revolution in sexual mores that promoted greater openness. This cohort of women, who were born between the 1880s and the 1930s, has a uniquely valuable perspective on these questions. In the course of a long-term oral history project I talked about sex and reproduction with two dozen women in a rural community located in south-central New York State.³ (For a list of the eighteen women who agreed that their comments on these subjects could be quoted pseudonymously, see the appendix, which includes their year of birth, their age at first marriage, the number of children they bore, and the number of children their mothers bore.) This material is not drawn from a representative sample but, rather, comes from a small number of informants in a tightly circumscribed geographic area and cultural milieu, so it does not provide the basis for substantive revision of feminist histories of women’s knowledge of sex and practice of birth control. Rather, it is a work of recovery, reclaiming women’s perspectives on a central dimension of their lives in the past. Yet it provides unique insights into older women’s views about this aspect of their life histories as they looked back at their youth and articulated what it meant not to know much about “the facts of life” when they married and then to learn about birth control when they were already mothers.

The rural women I interviewed during the 1980s were diverse in terms of class and ethnicity, including daughters of landowning farmers and landless laborers. Some belonged to immigrant families that had recently moved to the rural area, others to native-born families that had deep roots in the locality. All were accepted as white, although a few had visible traces of Native American ancestry, and others belonged to southern European groups that were initially stigmatized because of their dark skin, hair, and eyes. Cultural differences between natives and newcomers were bridged as children attended one-room schools together. Economic differences among farmers were becoming more marked: some of these women grew up on commercial dairy farms, while others’ families conducted small-scale, diversified farm operations and sold their produce directly to urban consumers. Yet during the 1920s and 1930s all their families suffered from the decline in farm prices and then the Great Depression. In their youth some of these women commuted to work in factories and offices in Endicott, Johnson City, and Binghamton, but all spent their formative years and adult lives in the Nanticoke Valley, an upland region that, despite its paved roads and telephones, retained a distinct rural culture. The notions of gender to which farm families subscribed were hardly conventional: women went to the barn and toiled in the...