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Not wanting to get married

1951

Jean talks about the expectation and , get married and have children, like other girls her age. She turned 16 in 1951.

"I grew up in very deprived circumstances, very working class home, back streets of Birmingham and I should say that all of my peer group girls were married by about sixteen because they were pregnant. That’s why people got married then because they were pregnant, it wasn’t much to do with love or anything else, and I knew that I didn’t want do any of that. I didn’t want to be married and I didn’t want to have children. I used to think to myself 'I’d quite like to be a widow' without any of the stuff in between. All the kudos about being a young woman then was about marriage and that was the expectation. So I wouldn’t have thought I was gay".

Contributed by: Jean Turley, 72

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