Popular author Miss Suzie published Préservation et éducation des sexes in the same era as Faucconey’s La virginité; she does not hesitate in offering a subjective opinion of female sexuality, instead offering an early feminist reading of sexuality. However, to establish her credibility, she details the various male and female genital organs for several chapters and explains the function of each. For example, she writes that “L’hymen est une membrane formée par un repli de la muqueuse et qui borde l’entrée du vagin” and gives a diagram of female genital organs that includes the approximate location of the hymen. With her expertise now established, Miss Suzie proceeds to describe several methods for new wives to pretend that their husbands
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In the four texts studied from the fin-de-siècle years, two approached the hymen and virginity from a strictly medical and clinical angle while two offered differing subjective opinions of virginity. The general consensus among medical as well as popular sources from many different decades found that the wholeness of the hymen could not be equated with virginity. Since no other option existed for determining whether a woman was a virgin, the general defeat of hymen-related virginity left the physical act of first-time penetration without a symbol or a method of testing. Therefore, since classifying the purity of women was so necessary to bourgeois men, the only method remaining required judgment of one’s morality. This judgment came with severe consequences, ranging from the “virginity of knowledge” described earlier that kept girls ignorant of their future and responsibilities to tactics for imitating the breaking of the hymen, where Miss Suzie could not fully support female sexual freedom but instead taught methods of reclaiming the appearance of purity. The question of a woman’s sexual history did not keep women in check as well as the question of her character, so it only follows that the vaguely defined innocence and purity received most of writers’—and
In the four texts studied from the fin-de-siècle years, two approached the hymen and virginity from a strictly medical and clinical angle while two offered differing subjective opinions of virginity. The general consensus among medical as well as popular sources from many different decades found that the wholeness of the hymen could not be equated with virginity. Since no other option existed for determining whether a woman was a virgin, the general defeat of hymen-related virginity left the physical act of first-time penetration without a symbol or a method of testing. Therefore, since classifying the purity of women was so necessary to bourgeois men, the only method remaining required judgment of one’s morality. This judgment came with severe consequences, ranging from the “virginity of knowledge” described earlier that kept girls ignorant of their future and responsibilities to tactics for imitating the breaking of the hymen, where Miss Suzie could not fully support female sexual freedom but instead taught methods of reclaiming the appearance of purity. The question of a woman’s sexual history did not keep women in check as well as the question of her character, so it only follows that the vaguely defined innocence and purity received most of writers’—and