What tales did you hear about your female relatives?

I never met my paternal great grandmother (she passed away when my dad was little), but I heard stories about her, including one during WW2. My country was colonized by Japan during the last quarter of the war. My great grandfather was a wealthy merchant and Japanese officials were pretty much in good relationship with him; he was even friends with a high ranking Japanese official in the area. But every time Japanese soldiers showed up at his store, my great grandma and other female family members would drop anything they were doing and went hiding inside the swamp until those soldiers leave. Not just standing around, they submerged themselves in swamp water. Everybody knows no matter how good my great grandpa's relationship with the officials, the moment they lay their eyes on his female family members, those women would be taken and become "comfort women". They'd rather have leech suck their blood and risk encountering crocodiles than becoming sex slaves.

Thanks to that story I learned (from a very early age) that the world is a dangerous place for women, that no matter how good your relationship with someone is they can always stab you in the back and that SeX WOrK iS wOrK is total bullshit because men who deliberately using women for sex don't care about how they destroyed those women's lives through their actions.

My great grandmother was not respected by her husband, in laws, or even her children because she was an uneducated and superstitious housewife. When the regime was overturned her husband was terrified that he would be arrested for his prestigious title under the former government.

As years passed peacefully their family realized that all those hours my great grandmother had gossiped with neighbors, looked after their children, and regifted precious rations to someone who needed it more she had built so much goodwill that not a single person in the community was willing to denounce her husband, even though it would have won them prestige and material reward.

I don't know that much about most of my female ancestors other than most of them were establishment so did not have to work outside the home. My father's mother volunteered at the nearby hospital part-time once her children were grown. My mother's mother (widowed) was about to accept an administrative position at a university when she died. Her mother was known for supporting higher education. (My mother, her mother, and her mother all graduated from the University of Toronto.)

One great aunt was a debutante who came out at a ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa (Canada) with the Governor General, had a big society wedding, a divorce, then got a job as a single mother when her peers were mostly not in the paid workforce. That was considered adventurous.

Another female not-ancestor relative (Agnes Scott) was a gossip columnist in Ottawa. She was a poor cousin (her parents had died) who was smarter than she was attractive, and eked out a living going to events and writing them up under two pseudonyms. She later married for money. She gets written up in local history books because we need more women to write about.

One great great grandmother was a child star (Mary Ann Heron of the Heron family) from Ireland who was supporting her family in comfort by the age of six, performed male roles for her entire career (including Richard III at age nine opposite adults), then retired, much to her family's displeasure (they needed the money), when she married at age twenty-one. I think she's probably the most exciting one.

Then there was the ancestor who married her step-brother who was also (I think) her second cousin twice over. I gather the family did not support them marrying, so they had to live on a farm when first starting out before becoming solid middle-class city people.

Alas, a three-greats grandmother died at age thirty-eight after having thirteen or fourteen children. (I think they were middle-class given the family her husband was from.) And another female ancestor was separated from her husband (at a time when divorce was very rare and hard to get) and forced to live away from her four children, though they later joined her in England when they went to boarding school there. I don't know how generous her allowance would have been, but her husband was one of the wealthiest people in Canada at the time, so hopefully she wasn't too badly off.

I'm not sure how I feel about any of this. The problem with having lots of famous and/or well-off male ancestors is that the women tended to live in the shadows. As a result I tend to feel overshadowed by my family history, which hasn't always respected the women and got away with sometimes sidelining them. I myself ended up in the underclass (on disability) after being kicked out of the family for standing up for myself after being abused. I assume at least some women in previous generations were also abused. So many of them never married, and I'm not sure why.

Sorry no crazy risks here. Hopefully someone else had a grandmother in the French Resistance or something equally glamorous.

I can’t tell a really good story because it reveals my very unusual surname. But in the vaguest terms possible: a female ancestor of mine stood up to a mean bullying husband about a matter of inequality and won, at great personal cost. I’d not actually interpreted it in the light of feminism before seeing this thread so thank you!

I know very little about my foremothers. My maternal grandmother died when I was three and I didn’t even know my paternal grandmother’s name until adulthood (father was adopted). All I know is my mother was the youngest of ten and Grandmother must have had a hell of a time raising all those kids on a tradesman’s pay with the Depression looming. I’ve never regretted not knowing her; she didn’t seem to be someone I would have liked at all.

My maternal great grandma was a suffragette. I never met her, and sadly my grandma died before I was born, but my mum says she was quite an intimidating lady! I am immensely proud of her, even though I don't know the details of what she did and how she helped the movement. My grandma (her daughter) met my grandad when she marched into his office in the military demanding equal pay for women, and my mum was one of the first female salespeople in the IT industry in the UK, so I guess the spirit runs strong in all of us!

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Mostly working in factories and farms. One of them ran her own laundry business.

I don’t know very much about my foremothers beyond their names. Two of my great grandmothers immigrated from Poland by themselves as young women. I think leaving everything you know to start over on your own like that is kind of bad ass, but I’ve heard very little about them from my father as their English wasn’t good and my grandparents didn’t teach their kids Polish (and didn’t share family stories much). I remember being told as a teen that one of my great grandmothers attempted a self abortion of her 12th child (she was alright), but it heavily influenced my being pro choice.

Both my grandmothers were outspoken, no nonsense women and I definitely learned to speak my mind from both of them. I wish I knew more about them outside of their roles as grandmothers and mothers.

This is my favorite real-life story from a female relative. My great grandmother told me this one, about when she was a kid. Great Grandma was born in 1917 and grew up on a farm in rural North Dakota, the granddaughter of Norwegian immigrants. She was one of five children.

Her brothers used to like to climb up onto the platform of the windmill. She, being a girl, was not allowed to climb up there. However great grandma was rebellious and mischievous in general. One day she got on the windmill platform by herself and started dancing up there! Her brothers snitched on her, and her father saw her and stood at the base of the windmill and said "[Her name], get down from there" calmly. She got down. I can't remember if she said her father gave her a whoopin after that or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did.

She also told me about a time in school (yeah, she attended a one-room schoolhouse) and her teacher asked her to say her ABCs. She didn't want to say her ABCs. So the teacher put her in the coal bin.

I'm a simple woman, as were all my foremothers, but I like these stories. It shows that people really haven't changed. Kids have always been brats (people seem to think that ancient kids were more obedient?) and women and girls have always resisted and resented the unnecessary restrictions on their freedom that men aren't subjected to.

I am going to brag a little about my grandmothers, because I am so darn proud of them and feel so lucky that they are the women I have had to look up to my entire life.

One of my grandmother left school after grade 11 to become a nurse - they were so desperate for nurses in those days. She grew up very poor with an alcoholic/abusive father and wanted to get out. She became a nurse and is still well known in our community for her commitment to nursing. Despite having retired a long time, she is still active in the nursing community and still goes by hospital to spend time with the seniors (all of whom are usually much younger than her) and is often found at community meetings to fundraise for new equipment, etc. She raised her kids more or less on her own, as my grandfather was bedridden with mental illness for much of his life. She is one of the strongest women I know and has continued to be a beacon of light, an example of unconditional love, and a reminder of finding joy in the smallest of things.

My other grandmother grew up the daughter of a doctor, so economically and socially very well off, though she was born into a family that did not see much value in women. Whilst her dream was to pursue music (she was quite successful and had scholarship offers to pursue music), she was basically told the only way she would be supported by her family was to become a teacher because girls didn't do music. So she became a teacher - she taught basically anything she could teach, including school. Then she married "across religious lines", marrying a Methodist as an Episcopalian - this was a big deal at the time. My grandfather got sick and died when she was in her early 40s and she never remarried. She continued teaching, and since retiring nearly 30 years ago has travelled all over the world and spends much of her time when not travelling sailing and hiking. Like my other grandmother, she is incredibly strong, and has been a teacher to me in terms of being grateful for the small things, to step outside of my comfort zone, and she has helped me develop my connection to Nature and Mother Earth.

Both of my grandmothers instilled the importance of being self-sufficient and educated as women, as had they followed the path expected of many women of their time, their lives would have looked a lot different as neither had husbands who could have supported them and their families "in the long run". They are both quite religious and their faith has been a big part of being able to carry on when the going got really tough. I haven't followed the same path of religion, but seeing the importance of religion to both of them is beautiful and as I have explored my own spirituality, it has opened the door for a lot of good conversations.

Maternal: My great-grandmother was an awesome and wonderful woman. She loved history was too much, so she often got wrapped up in doing her own little history projects (never saw the light of day, but was solely for her own curiosity). She would spend a good chunk of her free time in history museums, and that is where she met my great grandfather, who was also very into history. Great grandmother married, moved countries and worked as a mid-wife. Unable to have her own children, she adopted my grandmother and her siblings. She was hard-working, ridiculously kind and gentle, and also loved to play pranks. Sadly, she died not too long ago, and I miss her so much.

Paternal: Great-grandmother survived her native country's occupation by foreign powers and lived through a genocide of her people (by the same foreign power). I never got to meet her.

This is the furthest back that I know of any of my relatives.

My maternal grandmother was born in 1913, she died in early 90's when I was too young to remember. My mom is he last child of 12 and grandmother had her at 45 - the only child to be born in a hospital and not the sauna! Two of them died as children and one committed suicide in his thirties.

I didn't personally know my grandmother but I think about her a lot, what her life was like.They were poor and had a plot of land and few animals, days were filled with work. She lived through three wars and had to send her children to safety and leave her home for a time. Her husband was away fighting for five years and was an abusive alcoholic when at home. He died in the 60s and she never married again.

There's two pictures of her at my parent's place - one of her family from before my mom was born, she's in her thirties but to me she always looked so much older in that photo, she's so grim an worn. Another picture is of her with my mom, taken not long before grandmom died. Grandmom is in a wheelchair, and mom is pushing her on the yard of the care home and running and they're both laughing. Mom says she has good memories of her, that she was funny and kind. She taught mom to knit and weave rugs and to believe that God is good and everything happens for a reason. My mom raised me to believe too but I've gone a different way on matters of faith, she worries but understands.

The older I get the more I appreciate this living history of a long line of women that she carries with her, and of which I'm a part of too. There's nothing written down anywhere, but I'll learn from my mother how to weave rugs and bake pies, and maybe my daughter in her turn will learn from me.

Who wants to go first!?

My grandmother went to college when she was 40 despite everyone telling her not to. She ended up getting her teaching degree and spent the rest of her life teaching underprivileged kids how to read and write!

First of all, great idea.

This is pretty recent, my story features my mother grandmother and great aunts. My grandmother was one of 8 children, in her early teens when her mother died, their father having previously died. Poor, coal miners, immigrants. My great aunt and uncle took over the family, they were of age & would not let the authorities split them up. All that could went to work, leaving Margaret(g'ma) home to keep house & cook for 8 people & look after the youngest, Ambrose. They all had successful, normal working class lives. The three girls worked during the war, my great Aunt Mary was the 'glamourous' one, came back from California with a red convertible and a (gross) fur coat, I met it in later life. 😝

All married and had kids, except for Mary. She obviously couldn't after 9 years of marriage. Meanwhile my mother got pregnant at 19 and tried to slope off, give birth and not let anyone know. She nearly died, the parents were called & There we were.

My grandfather wanted stranger adoption, forget the whole thing happened. The three sisters said nope, we're keeping her & no one will know. So and I'm not sure if any legal docs were drawn up, I was given to Aunt Mary & her husband to be raised safely and with much love in My own family. They never told me. of course there were 'things'' but kids are easy to get into a don't ask, don't tell mindset. I was so obviously physically one of them, with a strong maternal resemblance. I found out when I was 36, when my grandfather died. My Dad told me, how my Mom hadn't wanted me to know while she was alive. How happy I made them, how they did the best they knew how regarding the deception. I get it. That's what people did at the time.

My mother kept the secret for years, giving up a baby is awful, and she married, had other kids, but eventually had a psychotic breakdown which we now believe was connected to her postnatal depression, self medication & repressed emotions.

I've had, am having a great life, successful career, family of my own, got some half siblings after being an only child. What those four women did they did with love & bravery. It was the 50's, my grandfather should have had the decision, but with my adoptive fathers support, they stood up to him. I was and am theirs, as are my own daughter and son. I think it's a good story with a happy ending for everyone but my poor birth mother, who paid the price of having a pregnancy she didn't want ending with a baby that she did but was not allowed to raise.

When we spoke for the first time as mother & daughter, she said: ask me anything I will tell you the truth. She did. Throughout she kept repeating: I knew where you were, that you were safe and that my Aunt Mary, who was a wonderful, loving woman had the dearest wish of her heart: a child to raise.

Thanks for reading their story, brave women, sisterly solidarity doing the right, female protective and caring thing.

My mother's mother Annie Blackburn, who died many years before I was born, had a vision of the Blessed Virgin & became a Roman Catholic in about 1917. Her husband was away at the war, and she'd recently had a miscarriage. When he came home on leave he apparently went down on his knees begging her not to convert, but she did it anyway. Every year on 28th December, my mother would say "It's the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the day my mother died. How appropriate!" (and now I say it). Some of the things that my mother picked up from her I say now: "Have you got your hatpin and your pepper?" (said to her 3 daughters when they were dressed up to go out in the evening). I say them to the grandsprogs!

My great-great grandmother Ada Lumley and her 4 sisters were piece-workers, making chocolate boxes at home for Rowntrees in York. It was paid at a very low rate (I forget the sum: fourpence, perhaps) for a gross - 144!

She became a single mother to a son whose father remains unidentified. A few years later she married a Mr Holmes and confused us all by calling herself a widow and giving herself a fictitious maiden name - which put us off the scent of researching her, until my cousin Angela realised that the name she'd given was her own mother's real name.

This was not a story I ever heard, because it was totally covered up and lied about. It only came to light when I was researching her son's misfortunes and realised his surname was a bit variable. This is why.

My father's mother, Olive Pick, was one of five sisters (the five lovely Pick Sisters: Elsie, Theresa (Auntie Triss), Corisande, Clarissa (Auntie Clar) and Olive Irene - her parents seem to have been rather romantic in their choice of names, and her father, a pilot, had been to Archangel and other ports in the Russian Arctic, hence the Irene.

She was a wonderful cook, winemaker and gardener: a country woman who remembered being warned to be good or else "Boney will fetch you" - "Boney" was Napoleon Bonaparte, although she was born in 1892, years after the threat of invasion by the French had vanished. Her garden is part of my idea of paradise. As a small child I was taken out foraging for cowslips with her - her cowslip wine and damson wine were fantastic. She died when I was 15 and after my mother cleared her house, we had pots and pots of her jams and bottles and bottles of her wine.

I've just been marmalade making, and I used to make a lot of hedge wines. Not cowslip though, because they're so rare these days: I can't remember when I last saw a meadow full of them. My dandelion wine was pretty good, but I don't think it was a patch on hers.

Oh gosh, I have a long, long family tree, but most of that's just names, dates. I only know stories from recent history.

But ... One of my grandmothers grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression. She had older brothers who were the apples of her mother's eye, but she herself was just one more economic burden. When she was barely in her teens, she got pregnant. Not by another teen but by a married adult man who had a whole other family already -- wife, kids, the whole nine yards. Her mother took the baby when she was born and kicked my grandmother out. This was a young girl, early teens, with few options. She went back to the married man, who decided to leave his family and "run away" with her. They moved far from his family and hers and settled down together. I suppose there weren't too many laws on the books at that time governing the age of consent, or maybe they weren't pursued. At any rate, they eventually got married and had five more children before he bailed on them just like he bailed on his first family. My grandmother fought hard for herself and her children -- she went to work as a nurse's aide and eventually put herself through nursing school to support her family. I'm sure it wasn't easy, and she was carrying around a lifetime of trauma from her own abusive childhood, her rape-y husband, and six children before she was even in her mid-20s. She was fierce and defiant, and she took nothing from anyone. Her story is probably pretty indistinguishable from many other women's stories from that period, but she struggled. She sacrificed. She worked her behind off. She protected the children she was able to keep. And she survived.

My other grandmother had a much different story. She grew up with a sister and two parents in a fairly upper-middle-class family. My great-grandmother was someone to be reckoned with, and my grandmother was a Feminist, with a capital F, but she was so much more than that. My grandmother got married in her mid-20s and had no intention of giving up anything to be "just" another wife and mother -- you know, the stereotypical one. She planned to continue doing everything she was already doing -- working, volunteering, socializing. And she did. She was working in a newspaper office (and at that time in history, that wasn't somewhere you'd find women) and even ended up being the first woman in her local union (she earned her place in history!). She founded a historic society in her little county, and she volunteered for this, that, and the other thing. She had a lady's bridge club and invited all the ladies over to socialize but also to schmooze. My grandmother was a force of nature. Oh, yes, and she raised two children while doing all of this, too. The women in her husband's family weren't anything to sneeze at, either, but I don't know too many stories. My grandfather was born at the turn of the century (to give an idea of dates). One of his sisters got pregnant, but at that time, that was just about guaranteed to bring shame on the family. But she couldn't give it up, either. So she had a little "visit with a family member," after which her mother had a "late in life baby." The sister ended up raising the baby, anyway, and the family just told everyone that they had an incredible bond and she loved the baby just like her own. I'm not sure if it was an open secret, their idea of a little joke, or just their way to avoid shame ... but I guess it worked. The sister got to raise her child, and there never seemed to be any shame attached (according to my dad, anyway). The other sister was a lesbian, which, of course, wasn't going to fly much better than an out-of-wedlock baby, not at that point in time. But she took a job as a teacher, moved in with her best friend, and they lived apparently happily together the rest of their days. Because they were just friends, you know, with a wink and a nod.

I guess none of these stories is anything too special or unusual. But I like that they persisted. They all fought for happiness, protected the people they loved, pursued their dreams, and lived their lives to the very best of their ability while pushing back against the constraints imposed on them from the outside.

This is not a direct relation but it's a story from an 80 year old friend of mine about her grandmother. Living In Australia in a rural area She and her sister worked a gold mine together, just the two of them. It was a small hand operated open pit. Between the two of them they had 24 children. They did really well out of the mine, and some of the men in neighboring pits were jealous. They screwed with them by disconnecting their water (necessary for gold mining) so granny just told her sister to wait, went and got a shotgun, went up the the fellas and said really nicely "If the water isn't back on by the time I get down the hole, I'm coming back. I won't be asking, I'll be shooting." And then strolled back into the pit to find, miraculously, it was fixed and never had any more trouble.

They had a lot of trouble trying to do the family tree on that side and eventually found out it's because she legally registered all 12 of her kids with her own last name, not her husbands.

Separate story, I recently found out that my grandma sometimes paid the bills by counting cards. Dressed up nice, never took too much, always lost the last few hands so they wouldn't get suspicious.

I will try and tell this story the best I can. This is about my maternal great-great grandmother.

She lived on a farm with her husband until he died of what I assume was Spanish Flu. Anyways, when he died, she was left to be a single mom of, at least, 6 daughters. Yes, she had at least 6 daughters. I know that's a dream for a lot of women here. So, this was around the 1910s-1920s and she had to provide for her daughters somehow.

She moved states to the city, where she operated a boarding house. I don't remember the logistics of it because I cannot find the Facebook page where someone explained the story, but this was before they split houses up like you see in addresses with 3/4. So, I think she operated it from her own house. I always thought that, especially back then, it must have been hard for her to get back on her feet, but she showed bravery in moving to the city (not a big city by any means, but it would've been for a farm girl) by herself.

For a while, the street they lived in was mostly occupied by family. I'm pretty sure she lived next door, or on that street, as my great-grandma and her husband.

One of her daughters, with her husband, opened up an ice cream shop that is still owned by members of the family today.

Edit- I do wish I had more stories. I have a branch of the family that has a holler named after them, and my best friend when I was in school lived in that same holler. Only I didn't realize then. There must be some stories from the women there, but I don't know anyone from that side...not their fault, though...most of them.

My dad was adopted from European parents as a baby, his adopted mom was a tank driver in WW2, I never met her since his parents were older and died before I was born.

On my mom's side my great great grandma Belle (her nickname) traveled from New York to California via the Ithmus of Panama on a donkey she was on one her mother and baby sister on another, her father was a miner and they ended up in South-west Oregon. She taught her children to read with the Bible and the Sears catalouge since there was only one school for older kids at the base of the river and they lived up stream. Her dad died in a mining accident and we found some local store reciepts, showing tha her mother Mary had managed to pay off her debts even after his death, and having 6 kids.

My auntie Barb (the daughter of Belle) was a WAC and her favorite part of service as the first female Aide de Camp in the South Pacific was spending time and comforting the Korean orphans of war. After she retired to Arizona she'd always send us fun gifts from Mexico like scorpion fossils in amber.

My grandma was the fastest gunmaker in ww2 she even got an award. She was a WAC

My paternal grandma was in her local paper for being one of the first girls (or maybe even the first) in, I think, her school's radio club. It was some type of 1930s tech club. She also didn't like baseball because it wasn't rough enough for her. I remember one story that she and my grandpa would write to each other in code during The War (WWII), so they write to each other without military censors censoring them. Basically so she could know where he actually was and let the other women know where their men were too. My dad and his siblings think she might have been exaggerating a bit. Unfortunately, their letters have long since been destroyed, so there's no proof either way.

Sadly I don't really remember my maternal grandmother since she had Alzheimer's and died when I was a kid. I'm pretty sure went to college, so she was way more educated than my grandpa since I don't even think he finished middle school. I know she used to paint since we have some of her old paintings.

I come from a long line of women who were sex trafficked by their families. As far back as I can trace it was a great great aunt who was prostituted to pay for the ship passage for her brothers to immigrate to the US. Those brothers then raped and sex trafficked their daughters and so it goes down through the generations. It was generally a big open secret and designed to be treated as "no big deal". Of course, the human soul can't process it as no big deal, and so the women suffered immeasurably, but ultimately found ways to bring joy into their lives where they could.

On the other side of my family, women are bred tough, and every single woman dating back to 1904 has divorced her husband for "intolerably cruelty", as it says on the divorce records, and I'm sure we can imagine what that means. Their traumas made them not particularly great mothers, and that certainly passed down to me. But nonetheless I am in awe that these women had something so strong in themselves that, even at a time where all of society was set up against divorce, against single motherhood, against women making a living on their own financial means of their own. They still found a way.

My great great grandmother kept the family alive during the Civil War. Her husband left her to go fight while she was pregnant and had a 1 year old baby and promptly got killed. Given how poor they were I would have been angry about that, if I were her. During Sherman's March to the Sea, she took the family cow and what family silver we had and hid in the briar bushes. Because of her, they made it through the winter without starving to death. I don't know much else about her but she was later known to be a bit of a firecracker who used to challenge men to buggy races. She was one of a handful of my female ancestors I know of who were known for being tough and spirited.