Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  Clearly, virginity still matters. But just as clearly, it matters differently now than it did a hundred years ago, or five hundred, or a thousand. As the primary determining factor in perceptions of female virtue, honor, character, and worth, virginity is indeed on the decline. If we believe that reckoning intrinsic human value should be based on deeper and more substantive qualities than whether or not someone has once been sexually active, we should find this pleasing.

  The Empirical Virgin

  There is in any event little point to hysterical proclamations that virginity is vanishing. To paraphrase P. T. Barnum, there's a virgin born every minute. And as long as human beings have to negotiate the transition into adult-partnered sexuality, virginity will continue to be meaningful both personally and socially. The question we need to be asking is not whether the culture of virginity has been changing over the last century or so. It has. The questions we need to be asking are how and why it has changed and whether or not these changes are yet complete.

  The primary way that we have done and continue to do this is through the scientific study of sexuality. Accustomed as we have become to having an empirically based medical establishment, it is sometimes difficult to appreciate how recently this mode of research became commonplace, but in truth we cannot begin to speak of a consistently scientific approach to either medicine or sexuality until the second half of the nineteenth century. Earlier research into sexuality typically depended more upon compelling anecdote than on reproducible data.

  Sexology, the scientific study of sexuality, had its beginnings in the late-nineteenth-century work of psychologists and psychiatrists like Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Although early sexologists were primarily concerned with abnormal and criminal sexuality, as in Krafft-Ebing's famous Psychopathia Sexualis, they soon began to study the parameters of "normal" sexual desires and activities as well. Surveys of sexual behavior and attitudes began to be conducted in the United States as early as the 1920s. Within a couple of decades, British and continental researchers had begun to follow suit. Still, the kinds of massive, quantitative sex surveys we now think of when we think of sex research did not come into being until after World War II, with Alfred Kinsey's monumental 1948 Sexual Response in the Human Male.

  However one might be tempted to critique Kinsey's work (and some of the criticism is merited), it nonetheless transformed our expectations about what we could and should know about sex. Prior to Kinsey and Kinsey-influenced research efforts, such as the British Mass Observation surveys that followed close on Kinsey's heels, notions of what could be considered sexually "normal" or "average" were based mostly on hearsay and conjecture. After Kinsey, on the other hand, laypeople and experts alike could point to charts, graphs, and statistics and use them to determine what was and was not "typical." Attempts to take the behavioral and attitudinal measures of entire populations through statistics became a hallmark of sex research.

  During the same time period, increasingly rigorous research methods helped to reduce the role that emotions and cultural prejudices played in how the medical establishment dealt with women's bodies. This did not, by any means, magically eradicate sexism within medicine, but it did provide for vastly improved levels of transparency and frankness. Many women eagerly embraced this more matter-of-fact approach to their own reproductive and sexual lives. Women like Stella Browne and Marie Stopes in England and Margaret Sanger in the United States, all of whom worked to educate women about sexual health and contraceptive options in the early years of the twentieth century, were often overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of women who wanted to learn what science had to teach them about their own bodies and sexualities. An unsqueamish and, above all, unsentimental approach to dealing with women's reproductive and sexual health rapidly became the expected standard for the medical profession.

  Between 1890 and 1945 the West witnessed the rise of the birth control movement, the first commercially produced menstrual tampons, the establishment of the custom of the premarital gynecologist visit, the requirement (in some places) of venereal disease testing prior to the issue of a marriage license, the beginnings of a sexuality self-help literature written by women, and an increase in the popularity of hospital births.

  This new frankness was by no means limited to doctors' offices and the family planning clinics that were beginning to crop up in larger cities. For example, at the phenomenally popular 1939 World's Fair display devoted to the new vaginal product known as Tampax (introduced to American markets in 1936), hundreds of women a day stopped to get information and ask questions of the nurses there to answer them. Topics gynecological were addressed in books, pamphlets, and in the new genre of magazines appealing to female audiences. Even in 1918, a young British couple might get advice on contraceptive devices and sexual compatibility from Marie Stopes's Married Love. By 1930 a book intended for similar audiences, Theodor van der Velde's Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, quite unsqueamishly reassured its readers that many women did not enter married life as virgins. In 1940 books like Oliver Butter-field's Sex Life in Maniage provided readers access to clinical detail on topics as explicit as resistant hymens, vaginal lubrication, and "honeymoon" cystitis. Magazine advertisements for contraceptive devices and nostrums tended to remain back-of-the-book items along with other quasi-medical appliances, but advertisements hailing the convenience of tampons moved into the main pages of major women's magazines. Women increasingly felt entitled to take advantage of, and even to demand, no-nonsense, directly vaginal products like tampons that were both convenient and conducive to an active lifestyle. A large number of women clearly wanted to be able to deal with their sexual and reproductive lives in a practical, literally hands-on way. This was particularly true in the United States, where, as contraceptives historian Lara V. Marks has revealed, women were earlier and more fervent adopters of female-controlled intravaginal contraceptives like diaphragms and contraceptive jellies.

  At first such products were marketed to and considered acceptable only for married, presumably nonvirginal, women. But this state of affairs did not last long. What mothers and big sisters used and liked in terms of managing their own needs, particularly in regard to menstruation, younger women eventually heard about. And while this "trickle down" effect took some time, it is clear that women of all ages quickly came to embrace tampon use. As early as the end of World War II, Dr. Robert Dickinson's medical assessment of tampon use appeared in both the Journal of the American Medical Association and, in a somewhat less technical version, in Consumer Reports. Dickinson specifically stated that tampons did not "impede standard anatomic virginity," thus paving the way for younger women to use them and for tampon manufacturers to feel justified in marketing to that demographic. Authors of late-1940s and 1950s office gynecology textbooks took it as a given that any woman of menstruating age might well use tampons.

  By the 1980s, up to three-quarters of high school women used tampons regularly. While tampon manufacturers have occasionally felt moved to publicly allay fears that tampon usage threatens virginity, as in a 1990 Tampax ad that showed an introspective, white-shirted teenaged girl beneath the question "Are you sure I'll still be a virgin?" (the ad's text made it clear that the answer to that question was "yes"), on the whole it has become relatively rare for contemporary First World women to question the suitability of tampon use for any woman of menstruating age. The lesson of the tampon was that the vagina could be emotionally and sexually neutral territory. To learn to use tampons to absorb menstrual flow was also to learn that the insertion of an object into the vagina might be purely utilitarian, with no larger social meaning at all.

  It is difficult to appreciate, from our current vantage point, just what a radical departure this was from the nineteenth-century view. As in the controversy over the use of the speculum, Victorian doctors and patients alike lived in fear of even the most stringently medical contact with the vulva, let alone vaginal penetration. This permeated the nineteenth century's attitudes tow
ard women and their genitals to the point that Victorian girls and women were ideally not to be permitted to straddle anything, ever. Little girls were kept from riding on seesaws or hobbyhorses, and they were discouraged from running, jumping, or gymnastics, for, as historian of childhood Karin Calvert notes, it was believed that "playing the wrong game or with the wrong toys could prematurely awaken sexual feelings in children and destroy their natural purity." Ladies who rode horseback did so sidesaddle for the same reason. In this paranoid context, even bicycling constituted a terrifying threat. As two-wheelers became more and more popular among middle-class young people around the end of the nineteenth century, the medical journals revealed a feverish, sometimes pornographically detailed, concern that the pressure that the bicycle seat placed on the vulva and perineum not only held the menace of creating "arousing feelings hitherto unknown and unrealized by the young maiden" but might, the articles claimed, contribute to painful and debilitating disorders of the genitals as well.

  Intriguingly enough, the idea that such spraddle-legged activities constitute a threat to virginity shows up in sex education texts to this day. Despite the lack of any actual studies in the literature regarding whether horseback riding, gymnastics, or riding bicycles might have a particularly high rate of damaging women's hymens, virtually every contemporary writing about virginity aimed at teen girls is duly equipped with a disclaimer that says something along the lines of "many girls tear or otherwise dilate their hymen while participating in sports like bicycling, horseback riding, or gymnastics." Other activities, like tampon use and masturbation, are sometimes added to the list. But astonishingly, given the near-complete lack of hard evidence to support their inclusion, the odd mantra "bicycling, horseback riding, and gymnastics" shows up again and again.

  Today these three activities are invoked in a very different way than they were a hundred years ago. A century of liberalization of attitudes toward women—and sports and sexuality as well—has transformed bicycling, horseback riding, and gymnastics from looming bogeymen into a laundry-list reminder that not all women will have the same experience of virginity loss. Whether or not physical activity can actually damage the hymen is debatable; more debatable still is whether or not the hymen alone is a useful gauge of virginity anyhow. "Bicycling, horseback riding, and gymnastics" is now a placeholder for the idea that just because something happens to physically involve the genitals doesn't mean it's sex. Women's genitals, in other words, may finally be achieving the ability to simply be just another bit of the body, as essentially neutral and as variable as any other.

  The New Woman

  At the same time as empirical science was transforming attitudes about women's bodies, social and philosophical understandings of women were being transformed by progressivism, urbanization, and, perhaps most of all, by sheer economics. Urbanization, the rise of factory labor, and the accompanying surge of poor and working-class migration to the cities continued at a dizzying pace in the new century. The huge labor market meant that more and more women went to work, not merely as domestics (although many did) but also in sweatshops and factories. Regardless of whether the job was mechanized "women's work," as much sweatshop work still is to this day, or something quite different, women worked for a living and were paid in cash.

  Working women worked because they had to earn money to survive. But it would be a mistake to imagine that these women were blind to what it* meant that they were breadwinners and had the ability to pay their own way in the world. It would be a bigger error still to imagine that the culture in which this was becoming a more and more common state of affairs could possibly remain unchanged.

  Prior to the industrial era, there were only two groups of women who were likely to be self-supporting, the very wealthy whose wealth was inherited and the extremely poor who scraped by on whatever they could earn. Most women married not merely because it was socially expected that they would do so, but because marriage was, as Jane Austen had written nearly a century earlier in Pride and Prejudice, the "pleasantest preservative from want." Women were expected to be economically dependent on their husbands, their domestic labor compensated only in kind, not in cash.

  Over the course of a century, the wage-earning woman went from being the lower-class exception to being the unexceptional norm. The economic structure of the industrialized West thoroughly incorporated the presence of women's labor. (The same is now true of the global economy as a whole.) This largely unsung revolution of female paid labor provided the economic basis for a great many of the other revolutionary changes in sex and gender roles that took place in the twentieth century.

  One of those other changes came under the banner of "human rights." In its simplest form, the philosophy of human rights holds that all human beings are equally deserving of opportunities to thrive and prosper, regardless of their social rank or sex. Progressives made it their business to address not only the horrors of poverty, disease, and various social ills like child labor and prostitution, but also violations of human rights like discrimination against women. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, organized feminism attacked bias against women in multiple arenas, leading to sweeping legal and attitudinal changes that permitted women to own and control their own property, instigate divorce, file lawsuits in their own names, and vote. Forward-thinking activists pushed for more and better public and private educational options for all and were especially vocal in regard to the need for education for girls and women, including sexuality and contraception education.

  The working women of the early twentieth century lived in a very different world than their mothers and grandmothers. In many ways they themselves were a different breed: New Women. For these "thoroughly modern Millies," work meant leaving the house to earn a wage and socializing meant "going out." Dance halls, public parks, vaudeville houses, cinemas, restaurants, even beer gardens and nightclubs became the places where young people whose wages were not yet spoken for by spouses and children went to have fun. Music, fashion, art, and public mores all felt the impact of this new, largely young adult money and energy. Women rolled their stockings down and bobbed their long, high-maintenance hair. Skirts got shorter and clothing silhouettes leaner and more boyish. Corsets began to disappear in favor of elasticized girdles that allowed greater freedom of movement.

  Perhaps most shocking of all, young women began to let it be known that they were both conscious of, and quite able to manipulate, their own sex appeal. Flappers and vamps visibly flaunted their sexuality on stage, on screen, and in the streets. As the film roles of silent-movie star Clara Bow made clear, being a desirable, sexually successful woman had nothing to do with being a traditionally "good" girl. Bow, also known as "The 'It' Girl," was often cast in the image of her working-class fans as a waitress or salesclerk. Success at love, these films told their audiences, had everything to do with good looks, urbanity, and daring.

  A new game was afoot, and women and men alike were still trying to figure out what the rules were. The New Woman of the teens and twenties had not, despite all the enthusiastic press about her liberation, cast off the shackles of her sex and stepped unfettered into a brave new day where everything was possible. Rather, she had loosened a great many ties to old modes of living that no longer fit well, but had not yet established herself securely in something new. Sexuality was a much more visible and overt part of her life, from the films she saw to the clothes she wore to the dates she went on. Whether she personally kissed, necked, or petted or not, she wasn't likely to be ignorant of such practices. Her own feelings and desires only complicated things further. The New Woman's new sexuality was at least as much firewalk as pleasure cruise.

  In theory women were still expected not to have sex before marriage. But with changes in gender roles, female independence, the new custom of going out, and new expectations of sexiness as part of female identity, "having sex" had become a realm of many shades of gray. Even gynecology books acknowledged that wedding-night hymens were likely to have alread
y been dilated by probing fingers during hot and heavy petting, but refrained from qualifying such acts as being definitively either "sex" or "not sex." The new economic and social equations of sex and dating also meant that it was less clear what sex—whatever that was—was supposed to mean to a relationship. Where exactly virginity fit into all of it was as difficult a question as all the others.

  To many people, the new, overt sexiness of New Women promised not so much freedom as havoc. Sexually active women have always been considered troublesome, of course; one function virginity has served over the ages is to control women's sexual activity and make it something that can be policed and regulated. But as sexually self-willed women became more visible through movies, theater, journalism, and novels, more and more people became nervous about what that might mean. People questioned whether the New Women could still be trusted to fulfill their daughterly, wifely, and motherly roles. Seeing to it that they would became the subject of debate, research, and policy.

  Part of this process involved the study of a strange new creature. Neither child nor adult, this bizarre being was scarcely recognizable as properly human. In 1904 psychologist G. Stanley Hall assayed a systematic description of this troublesome changeling. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education was the opening salvo in the ongoing battle of Established Society versus the Young Person.

  Through Hall's eyes, the Young Person was a strange, volatile, contrary, and vulnerable creature. When it came to female adolescents, much of that vulnerability was specifically sexual. Anything that hinted at deviation from the expected standards of premarital virginity, early marriage, and postmarital monogamy was a cause for alarm. Not just psychologists but families, parents, schools, friends, and religious organizations all placed their own types of pressure on young women to conform to older, more conservative sexual and behavioral standards—standards that were perceived as being under heavy attack.