My oldest great aunty was ninety-seven in 1979. She talked incessantly about how it was as a teen from 1899–1914. She even left tapes and writings about it, but everyone thought it was such a shame she was off her noodle and wrote such drivel. I got into her stash of porn for the “wemen of prev-icy” as she referred to it. She extols the use of the hot water bottle as her marital aid. Not for the douche-bag efforts to flush out the innards. But how to have a good time with it by yourself. The nozzles were a twisted Bakelite (hard rubber), with one hole in the end. Hot water falling from the highest reachable hook into the vestibule of the vagina with the power of 70-foot pounds. She also had Ben Wa balls about the size of a duck egg. She used a duck egg sometimes to make swains think they had the largest tool in the box. She would insert one before the sashay around the county looking for a barn dance. Then on the way home the young man would provide her with spooning songs and the age-old attempt to seduce. She had decided the day before if he was going to get lucky after the dance or not. Copper sulfate (blue vitorale) was used as the “medicine” in the H2O bottle and condoms were available then too. Though most were animal or fish intestines or “skins” as they were called. The rhythm method was well-known to all.
Hundreds of unwed mothers’ homes flourished in major cities and hideaways all over the country. Customarily, you stayed home until your sixth month or seventh month even, then you went to Wichita, Kansas, to visit a sick aunt for three months and came back slim and happy. Sometimes schooled and taught a hobby like crocheting or dried-flower arangement. The Phyllis Wheatly home for unwed mothers in Wichita was very popular for Kansas City girls. Since 1873 it had from seventy to two hundred and fifty beds during its time ,was still in operation in the 1980s. Adoption was the real business, but the girls paid dearly for it too. In-house births and hospitals with in two miles. Seldom lost a client. She said that in her sixth grade class, two girls had Christmas babies but they were older than twelve or thirteen. School was not like it is today, you schooled after the family was fed or you moved to a place with a school. In her eighth-grade year, thirty-five girls in class at the start of the year, and five pregnancies before May 21. About the same her ninth-grade year: forty-one started with her, and then a really bad flu epidemic went through the United States, so twenty-nine were left in May. Three known miscarriages and three live births with two choosing to keep the child. Marguret Fischer-Waite was mother of two children; the second was in her senior year. Her mother had faked a pregnancy for the first one. But, the second was Maggie’s, she had him during the summer and could have tried to pull it out in a hatbox. (Fake it as someone else’s.)We didn’t think any less of her for the child as her fiancé was overseas for the Panama Canal problem. They married when he returned.
I have no Idea who/when orgasm was coined or by whom, but the ladies of earlier times just knew, “Good/Better/Peel me off the ceiling.” Mary Queen of Scotts was an extremely sexual female and wrote of her lover Dermerik. ‘‘I shall never allow him to be in my chambers. The pasettoui [ladies in companion to the Queen] fear for my continued sanity after he leaves me wilted in soggie expanse of silken ruffels. He speaks only Geleic. His red hair is longer than my own .he binds me thigh to neck by that stout sinew I can not escape. Others of endourments unnatural have not formed the clay of me so well and for so long.” She also wrote of masturbation and having “woman calls” for lack of a good man in her cortege.
1914 brought in European volunteers from America and Italy to do service in hospitals/quartermasters/clerks for the English and French. Then we became involved and a huge force of Americans were deployed to fight—new war with old training. Gas was being used, mustard gas. If you didn’t die you were permanently disabled by the burns on your lungs that would kill you the first time you got pneumonia or the flu.
