Okay question about prairie families?

Question

Okay guys this is a serious question for me so please get me serious information.

I am researching families from the prairie time period for college...and I am studying how they all lived in one room together. All these families seem to have tons of children. Okay the question is how were they able to find ways to make more children with the older children in the same room as them?

Serious answers only please thanks!

Also if you have any good websites with information from that time period I would really appreciate it.

Answer 1

Or wait 'til the kids are asleep and do it very quietly and discretely.

I really loved those Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was a kid but I did wonder about a lot of those unmentionable things, like how do you go to the outhouse when there is a three day blizzard.

Answer 2

Same way we do it now. Send the kids out to do chores or play at their friends' houses and enjoy the time together. It may be quick and fleeting at times, but it only takes a minute to make a baby.

Answer 3

I have friends who are missionaries and live in the same situation.  We asked this question and the wife laughed and said, "Oh, you find ways!"

She told us that in cultures where people only live in one room, there are designated "places" outside where you can go.  If you hear someone already there, you wait!  She said it's not nearly as awkward as it sounds and it's really not that hard to find privacy, even if it's not surrounded by walls, because of the openness of the place itself.

Answer 4

You send them out to do chores on the farm or tell them to go outside and play while you get it on.

Answer 5

The average slave cabin was about 240 square feet (12 x 20) and most slave couples had several kids, while most free families of the era lived in houses not much larger.  

Forget anything you've seen in movies like (ack hack cough) NORTH & SOUTH and other cheesy frontier and mountain movies:  s*x wasn't particularly romantic at that time, and people had completely different notions about the need for personal space.   This isn't to say that Ma and Pa cleared the table and went at it while the kids were doing homework, but in poor families and small houses it was understood that privacy was something you found under a quilt, preferably once the kids were asleep.  Consequently most kids pretty much knew the facts of life by the time they were teenagers probably, but it was also something they probably didn't talk about.   (If you, like I and like a whole lot of other people I know, ever accidentally walked into your parents' bedroom when they were having s*x then you'll probably know what I'm talking about when I say it's something that You all know happened but you all pretend didn't.)

Boys probably sought a lot more privacy when they m a s t urba ted (never sure what auto-bleeps)- the barn, the outhouse [horrible thought that], chicken coop, etc., anywhere there's a modicum of privacy- than their parents used having regular marital intercourse.   My grandfather was from a family of 16 children, 10 of them boys, and discussed this aspect a tad, basically the line into the woodshed or in summertime the spring house (a little rock shed over a well where cheese and milk and perishables were lowered into the water and stored to keep them as cool as possible) as those were the "primo" places.  As far as the non sexual things like having to get naked for baths in a room full of people he said "If you were shy about it you closed your eyes.  Didn't stop them from seeing you, but at least you can't see them seeing you".

Of course that's another thing: most of us with siblings have seen them stark naked at some point, and we weren't aroused.  Parents having s*x in the room (in a time when that was normal) was probably a similar thing- you probably almost didn't think of it as sexual beyond perhaps a "wish they'd be quiet so I can get some sleep" thing.

A not particularly relevant aside that I'll mention anyway: if you'll walk through an old graveyard where most of the graves are of people who died before the 20th century and in an area where most people lived on farms, notice the dates of birth.  You'll see lots and lots of people who were born in summer and fall, and a good many born in winter, and then a sharp decrease in the number who were born in spring.  The babies born in spring would have been those who were conceived in summer, when it's very hot and you're working outside all day in a time with no running water so you don't bathe a lot, and no air conditioning so even at night the bedroom's still hot and you don't want cover over you and you're sweaty and sticky and miserable and you and your spouse have both been working hard all day and food is cooked over a fire whose heat adds to the house---romance would be about the last thing on your mind.  

OTOH you'll notice a lot more kids born in summer than any other season.  These are the ones whose conceptions you can track back to winter, when not only is it cold outside (and cuddling in a bed is a nice extra heat source that often leads to other things) but there wasn't as much work to do outside so you weren't as worn out and tired (still a lot of work today, mind, just not in the sun).  It led itself to amorous pasttimes a lot more.

As for the outhouses in blizzards, they wouldn't have used them.  They'd have probably used chamberpots during such times (and during heavy rains); if the house had a dirt floor you could dig a hole and empty it and dig it up when the weather got better.   If it had a wooden floor (like my grandparents' house did) it was probably built over a raised crawlspace (actually built for breeze and as a home for dogs) and somewhere in the house would be a little hinged door where you could empty "slops" of all kinds (food, waste, etc.) if needed.   Most kitchens had a silver-dollar sized hole in the floor with a funnel to pour out wash water and the like, and I'd suspect urine from chamber pots was emptied through that as well.

One last thing- I promise:  in early accounts by the Spanish and English among the Indians in North America, one of the things that most alarmed them was the Indian's casual attitude toward s*x of any kind.  It was not at all uncommon in an Indian village to see a couple having s*x against the wall of a house, or hear the noises coming from inside (a single room shared by several sisters and their husbands sometimes) or to see boys masturbating fairly openly (cleaning themselves off after of course)- weren't no thang to them.   This led to early reports that Indians were sexual degenerates, which wasn't true at all- they didn't usually have many hang-ups about premarital s*x like whites had, but once you were married NO ADULTERY DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT (if you slept with a man's wife not only could he kill you but honor required it) though divorce was usually available if the marriage couldn't work.  (To the Creek Indians, where all newlyweds moved into the bride's mother's home, if a woman wanted to divorce her husband all she had to do was put his belongings outside of the doorway, while if a man wanted to divorce a woman all he did was go back to his own mother's [or nearest female relative's- kinship was matrilineal ] house.  The man still had to provide food for the woman and any children until the wife told him he could stop [usually when she remarried], but they were through with each other.  Each had to remain celibate until New Years [the fall harvest festival] to remarry, after which they were free to remarry.

Meanwhile the Indians looked upon the whites as crude savages because they didn't bathe (Indians in general were a lot cleaner), because they praised virginity and chastity but were hypocritical about it (i.e. adultery was rampant in white society) and yet the Euros didn't allow or at least stigmatized divorce.    They also thought Europeans were immature about s*x and didn't understand why the openness offended them.  There's an account- I wish I could remember the exact source- where an Indian woman who'd just made love to her husband while a European guest was in the house found him embarrassed and furious and just raging about what he considered the barbarism, and she helpfully tried to explain that "among our people, that is how babies are made, and it feels really good, so to us it's beautiful.  Please tell me because I've wondered, how do white people make babies?"

Answer 6

what I've seen in movies or read in books that they used to hang a quilt to seperate the rooms...maybe they were extra quiet while making more babies. Or they used to send out their kiddos to their neighbors who were about 2 miles away to borrow some wheat flour or have them mend fences or do more chores...