No, I am referring to our more recent ancestors--people who lived seventy-five, a hundred, three hundred years ago. At those times people believed sex before or without marriage was generally unwise, damaging to the female psyche and to society. And so it has proved to be.
And since that time, we invented prostitutes, concubines, and extramarital affairs? No, people really didn't refrain from it all that much, they were just way more hypocritical about it.
That actually is historical revisionism. The marriage rate in colonial times was under 50%. Alot of pitchfork weddings took place too, alot of people just shacked up and considered themselves married, without bothering with the church thing. They were monogomous, but not "married" per se. Historians have gone through the documents from the 1600's and 1700's in Colonial New England and were actually shocked to discover how low the church going and marriage rates were at the time.
Mostly wealthy people married in the church. Poor people have a custom of going to a bar, and literally jumping over a broom, and they were "married". It was called jumping the broom. That being said, marriage is a lovely institution that I am fond of and an active participant in, but the romaticized notion of the past where "everybody" got married, were religious, and acted stern and proper is not actually accurate.