"The Good Old Days"

A friend of mine recently let me know that her husband had blogged about sex education in the Christian community. Read it here.

I was mildly amused to read one of the comments a bit down the page, which included the following:

Funny... for generations Americans had the highest academic education in the world, and not a single 'sex-ed' class was involved.
No one was sexually ignorant beyond the fourth grade, and almost no young students were ever allowed sufficient unsupervised time alone that would create a pregnancy out of wedlock. If such did occur, it was considered a failure of adult supervision.

I've got to tell you, I always find these "good old days" kind of quotes mildly amusing in their naivette. One Christian historian I know tells me that 60% of couples getting married in colonial America were pregnant on the altar. I haven't a clue where to begin to look to verify this information, but I trust her scholarship. She tells of a practice called "bundling" where young unmarried couples, fully clothed, where tightly wrapped together in bedsheets to spend a night together. This was supposed to allow them to have closeness, but not be able to do anything untoward--being fully clothed and so tightly bound and all. Apparently it didn't work very well.

I know for myself that 2 sets of my great grandparents were 7 months pregnant when they got married. I've never asked about the other two sets--one of my grandmothers volunteered this information because she thought it interesting that they actually got married the same month and had their babies the same month--not knowing each other at the time. I also know a lovely woman who is about 80 years old who related to me that she was gang-raped at the age of 9--by her uncle and some of his friends.

The "good old days" were not necessarily so good.