Lonely hearts ads from 1970s, thankfully things have changed!

This thread fills me with horror to be honest. Meeting the new fellas parents soon. They are elderly farmers and have passed the farm to him.

I am a townie, born and bred. My "people" have nothing. I am a working single mother. I'm doooooomed!!! I can sense the disapproval already!
On the other hand I have proven I can breed a healthy heir to the throne so that might be something in my favour.

Ok this is the worst thing I remember hearing about women doing to prove themselves to be an asset and no possible financial burden to a husband.
I think it was done as part of a dowry.
I thought maybe it was just something I remembered hearing but was a possible figment of my imagination or nightmare reality going on in the world around me, so I Googled it and found an article where Nuala OFaolain refers to the practice.

Anyone of the real old school, when Irish women got all their teeth extracted before marriage so as to assure the oul’ fella that they’d never cost him a penny, can also stop reading.

http://www.smiletonight.com/NewsPressIrishTimes.htm

Thats it women having all their teeth pulled out and replaced with a full set of false teeth prior to marriage. Maybe I remember the story so well because my own mother who is a beautiful tall proud woman fastidious about her appearance, had all her teeth pulled out when she was in her 20s and married my father. I think in her case she had a gum disease they were unable to treat or unwilling to treat or it was too expensive to treat. Anyway it wouldnt happen now and I think at the time my mother like many women just trusted the expert, dentist, doctor and believed they knew best.
But can you just imagine! FFS

Yeah it was so the husband wouldn't have to pay for any major dental work in the future, my mom told me about that, her aunts had their teeth pulled, my grandmother had all her teeth pulled when she was 21 because of a viral infection that destroyed her gums, but a dentist wanted to pull my own mother's front teeth when she was 20 (she's only 53 now) and my grandmother went mad and said no way in hell after what happened her. But my mother's cousins are in their 40's now and they had most of their teeth pulled in their early 20's by crazy dentists, their theory was it was "easier" in the long run, madness.

My grandparents were both from rural backgrounds and met in 1957, even they were more advanced than these 70's ads! My nan was a teacher living in Germany with her German fiance, my grandad was working in a farm shop. My nan broke up with the German guy and moved home, her friends told her to come out with them for the night in Dublin and she didn't want to, but she met him that night There was no mention of dowrys, land, etc!

Acoshla tooth extraction in preparation for marriage, is a difficult thing for people to fathom if they have never heard of the practice. I thought I was going to be on my own here mentioning it in the first place and even questioned my own memories, so Im glad you came in and said you knew about it too.
Just because someone of the same age doesn't remember a particular practice doesn't mean the practice wasn't common in certain areas or among certain groups of people. Its just like how on other threads talking about things that have happened recently, there are other posters completely unaware of the kind of lives lead by some women living around them. Sometimes if something didn't happen to you or someone you know you just don't know about it.

I think at times there is not only a urban rural divide but a class divide too.
The class divide may not be as pronounced as say in Britain but it can still play an important part in access to knowledge and education, exposure to different ideas, confidence in challenging old ideas, travel, etc.
As I said free secondary education came in in 1967 so the first batch of the free leaving certers would have been in about 1972. Before that you would probably have to have been from a family who had a relatively big farm that could afford to send you to boarding school or have come from a family where the father had a profession, was in the civil service or had a shop or a pub. Access to education meant access to new ideas, jobs, mixing with people from outside of your area, travel and money. Irish mothers seemed to have a knowledge that education was the way out of poverty and the kinds of unfair constraints put on women at that time and after being able to feed your child being able to educate them was seen as making sure your children did better than you. Many Irish women of my age group would subscribe their education and subsequent freedoms and lifestyle to the persistence of their mothers and of the nuns who often gave of their own free time to provide extra classes or free study time for their girls.

Anyone from the better off end of the class or urban rural divide was less likely to have an awareness of what life was like for people at the less well off end of the divide. Just as they do now. People who had climbed the ladder were also more likely to subscribe things that they no longer approved of as basically coming from ignorance. In a way it was ignorance if by that you mean people had no way of knowing any different, no money to make different choices or naturally lacked the confidence to challenge things as they knew themselves to be uneducated and could not compare themselves to those who knew better. If by ignorance you mean people who are less than, then no, I dont think that why they had poor conditions and opportunities.

shopaholic01 wrote: »

Tee-totaller. Probably a good catholic pioneer!

Yes, doesn't mean he had a nice audi in the garage unfortunately

Re: the teeth thing. My mother is 67 and had false teeth top and bottom by the time she was in her 20's. Apparently the dentist told her she had "a high rate of decay" and they all needed to come out. This would have been in the mid/late 1960's. My mother was (is) too naive to question him. Even now she think her GP is infallible. In reality he's a very ignorant man and she's had health problems caused by misdiagnosis on his part. Despite my brother and I telling her to change GP's (no medical card so paying him €50 for the 'privilege' of seeing him) she won't.

okiss wrote: »

Another lady who is now in her late 50's told me that a farmer she knew was told by his mother to marry a girl working in the civil service... due to there stable income. He did as his mammy told him but it they split up later.

Marrying a woman in the civil service for her stable income at that time would have been a waste of time, as she would have been legally obliged to leave her job anyway once she married him.