At the age of puberty the body usually attains its full growth in length. Just before, young people sometimes increase several inches, but the quickness of growth is most sudden and perceptible in the genitals of both sexes. This growth in males is an expansion merely, but in females it is often attended with a contraction, to which different appellations have been given in explaining the signs of virginity.
Mankind, jealous of every kind of pre-eminence, have always put a superior value on what they could first possess, and that to the exclusion of others. This species of folly has given a positive entity to the virginity of women. Virginity, which is nothing but a _moral_, being a virtue that solely consists in the purity of the heart, men have, as with one consent, converted into a _physical_ object, and in which they also fancy themselves much interested. From these absurd opinions, usages, ceremonies, superstitions, and even awards and punishments, have been established: abuses the most illicit, and customs the most shocking and disgraceful, have been authorized. To ignorant matrons, and to prejudiced physicians, have young women been obliged to submit the most secret parts of Nature for examination, without their reflecting that such acts of indecency is a downright attack upon chastity, and that every immodest, every indelicate situation, which caused an internal blush, was little less than prostitution.
The prejudices that have been formed on this head I despair of removing. Things which mankind take a pleasure in believing, however nugatory and unreasonable they may be, they will always believe; yet, as it is the province of history to relate not only the accession of events, and the circumstances of facts, but also the origin of predominant opinions and errors, I think it my indispensable duty, in the History of Man, to examine this favourite idol to which he sacrifices; to consider what the reasons are by which he is prompted to pay that adoration, and to enquire whether virginity, as he understands it, is a real or merely a fabulous divinity.
Fallopius, Vesalus, Bartholin, Heister, Ruysch and many other anatomists, pretend, that the membrane of the hymen is a substance which actually exists, and which ought to be numbered among the parts of generation peculiar to women. They maintain further, that this membrane is fleshy, very thin in children, but more thick in grown girls; that it is situated under the orifice of the urethra, and that it partly closes the passage of the vagina; that there is a hole pierced through it, sometimes round, sometimes long, so small that a pea can hardly be passed through in infancy, or a bean at puberty. The hymen, according to Winflow, is a membranous kind of wrinkle, more or less circular, and sometimes semi-lunar, with an aperture, in some very small, and in others more large. Dulaurent, Graaf, Pineus, Mauricea, and other anatomists, of at least equal reputation and authority with those first quoted, insist, on the other hand, that the membrane of the hymen is nothing but a chimera, a part by no means natural to girls, and express their astonishment that it should have ever been mentioned as a thing which has an actual and real existence. In confirmation of this doctrine they adduce a multitude of observations made on girls of different ages, whom they had dissected, in none of whom this membrane was to be found. They confess that they have seen, though very rarely, a membrane that united certain fleshy protuberances, which they call _carunculæ myrtiformes_; but this membrane they insist is by no means consonant to the natural state of the parts. Anatomists are not more united as to the quality and number of these _carunculæ_. Are they merely wrinkles of the vagina? Are they distinct and separate parts? Do they belong to the membrane of the hymen? Is their number certain? Is there only one, or are there many, in the state of virginity? Each of these questions has been asked, and to each a different answer has been given.