a tale from long ago

[iverglas]

When I was little, I had a great-aunt named Dud. We assume that was because her younger sister, my mother's mother, couldn't pronounce "Lilian".

Auntie Dud was the sweetest person you could know. Actually, she was pretty much pathologically shy and self-effacing. She worked in a candy factory all her life -- a secure, if low-paid, job open to women around 1910, after she and her family immigrated to Canada. In fact, she was fortunate: the factory was, at the time, a model of "hygienic" industrialization -- white uniforms (which I have no doubt the employees had to launder), an employee cafeteria, great big windows, lots of sun and air. She lived in a rooming house in the southern Ontario (Canada) city where I grew up. When she visited us, my mother always ran a great big deep tup of water for her to have a hot bath, because the rooming house allowed only shallow splashing, to keep costs down.

She doted on her nieces and nephews, born in the 1920s and 30s, and then the five great-nieces and great-nephews, me and my brothers and cousins, who were born in the early 50s before she died, when I was four. She was especially devoted to my older boy cousin, whose parents obviously preferred his little sister. My first real experience of guilt/shame came when she died shortly after I had declined her invitatation to the circus, because I was a suck and wouldn't go anywhere without my mummy.

Long after her death, my grandmother told my mother a bit more of her story. Her surname was not the same as my grandmother's and her father's; it was her mother's surname. This, we then learned, was because she was born to her mother some years before she married my great-grandfather, and when she was still unmarried. All my grandmother knew was that her mother had been a housemaid in Nottingham, England, and Auntie Dud's father was said to have been the master of the household where she worked.

This past weekend, someone in the UK directed me to a resource for genealogical research that I hadn't known about: http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/
Nineteenth century birth, marriage and death records in the UK can be located on line, and then ordered up. Nineteenth century census records can be found on a companion site, http://freecen.rootsweb.com

I went looking for my Auntie Dud, and I found her. Her middle name is the surname my grandmother gave for the man who was her father. Her birth was registered in June of 1890.

And then, after much poking around (not having a birthdate), I found her mother, my great-grandmother. Her birth was registered in December 1875.

This means that my great-grandmother was 14 when she gave birth to Auntie Dud -- and probably still 13 when she became pregnant.

(The 1891 UK century census records are interesting on that point -- in scratching the surface, looking at a couple of dozen households in search of girls my great-grandmother's age, I found several 13-yr-olds, and even 11-yr-olds, identified as household servants. One can imagine how many of them ended up in my great-grandmother's situation.)

Her marriage to my great-grandfather was registered in June of 1897, and they had two other daughters, one about 9 months later, and my grandmother in 1901. My great-grandfather never actually accepted Dud into the family; for instance, she is not in the few early family photos we have.

Pretty clearly, Auntie Dud's entire future existence was determined by the circumstances of her birth. She had no self-confidence, something that would have been hard to acquire in a family where she was not accepted by her father. (We believe she was reared by her mother's parents before that.) And she was pretty obviously an illegimate child, what with having that odd surname. Her chances of marriage, in pre-WWI small-city WASP Ontario, would have been pretty slim. (She might actually have done better if she'd stayed in England, since she would have had a class to belong to there.)

And my great-grandmother herself ended up married to a man who rejected her child, and who was not particularly pleasant to her, herself. One might imagine that she didn't have a lot of options.

(I have also been in touch with a woman looking for records of her grandfather, born in the early 1880s, with the same surname as my father's mother. He and his brother were placed in a workhouse a few miles from my grandmother's town, at the ages of 5 and 7, in 1888. That was one option, of course.)

So ... I pretty much owe my existence to a 13-year-old being impregnated by her employer, and having no option but to have a child. (Certainly there were abortions performed at the time, but access and safety were more than problematic.) Had that not happened, she would not likely have married my great-grandfather, or had the daughter who became my grandmother. Of course, there are an infinite number of other things I could be said to owe my existence to, but this seems to be a definite sine qua non -- without that one, I wouldn't be here.

My great-grandmother may have thought that everything turned out for the best, but I would imagine that she would have been pretty sure that things would have turned out better for her had she not been victimized at that young age.

So the moral of this tale ...

These are the stories on which the struggle for women's reproductive rights and freedoms were built. Everyone's story is different. And we're all entitled to write our own stories, and not to have them written for us by people who don't live them.


(edited to fix my tendency to type 1900 instead of 1800 ;) )

[REP]

1. Another Story

A young woman - a teenager, really - married and had two children.

One died in infancy; the other died a few years later.

The marriage ended, and the woman remarried and became pregnant. She could not bear to have another child so soon after the death of her oldest survivng child. She was healthy enough, physically, but emotionally a wreck.

Abortion was illegal, but anything is available if there's money involved. She was taken to a place where the slatternly nurse assured her, "Don't worry, honey - his hands don't shake so bad when he's drunk."

By some miracle, the woman survived the procedure with no regrets. I am angry for her, and for all women like her, who were forced into unsafe, unregulated procedures. I am angry about all those women who lost their lives or were maimed by quacks. I am angry on behalf of the courageous doctors who risked jail to help women and keep them out of the ER or the morgue.

Now, we're faced with sanctimonious assholes who would tell this a woman in a similar circumstance to abandon her newbron to strangers rather than allow her terminate her pregnancy early in the first trimester. We're faced with puscillanimous lickspittles who say they're 'pro-life' but don't do anything to protect the doctors whose lives are being theatened or taken, or protest vigorously and loudly against the terrorist faction of their movement (yes, I'm talking about YOU).

[WildClarySage]

2. A couple of tales from not so long ago

back when I graduated high school (ok, maybe that was long ago) two of my best friends were pregnant at graduation. Both had abortions.

"April" was pregnant because she was confused about her reproductive cycle. A catholic girl, she didn't know much about contraceptives, but had been 'taught' the rudiments of the rhythm method. She thought you started counting the days from the last day of your menstrual cycle. Turns out that put her squarely at the most fertile time of the cycle to be having sex. She ended up pregnant.

"Mandy" was coerced by a boyfriend who lied, said he was sterile, and that if he didn't get to have sex his balls would ache for days and did she want to be responsible for that since it was her fault they were already that far into it, and then he told her that he wouldn't be able to love a girl who did that to him. She ended up pregnant.

April went on to get married and had two children with her husband, who turned out to be kind of a schmuck. They are now divorced. Their two kids, wonderful children, wouldn't be here if abortion was not legal, because her ex, the schmuck, wouldn't have wanted anything to do with her if she had been a mother when they met. He has said as much. April is now delighted to be pregnant with her third child, and she and this baby's father are going to be wed on Saturday.

Mandy's future was also determined by her decision to have an abortion. She married a southern fundamentalist conservative, has given birth to twins. When she told her husband about the abortion, early on in their relationship, he told her that he could forgive her, but only if she obeyed his instructions about God, so that she would be "saved". Any contrary opinions she's had about anything in their marriage has been silenced because of this control she has given him. One of their twins suffered a stroke following a seizure at a very young age and the result was unfortunately moderate brain damage. Mandy's husband told her that it was God's work, making her suffer for the sins of her mother, and that the abortion was the root cause. Mandy's other daughter is the president of her high school's young republican club.

[Iris]

3. Why is it up to Mandy's husband to forgive her?

The child wasn't his and even if it were, husbands don't forgive "sins" - God does.