In The Crucible, Proctor couldn’t prove that Abigail had slept with him.
Why not?! Didn’t they know how to check back then?
How do you propose they check? Hymens break for other reasons and some women don’t have a hymen without a hole to begin with.
Plus, the hymen doesn’t always break during first intercourse, depending on how deep it is, how long the penis is, and in what position the deed was done.
So either way, having or not having an intact hymen doesn’t indicate whether the woman is a virgin or not.
Yet there are (and were) still societies too stupid or evil to realize this. Not sure if this was the case when and where the play was set. Or if Arthur Miller would have known how they determined virginity or lack thereof. Or what the Commie metaphor for virginity is (registering to vote?).
Nor does it indicate whether a woman has been with any man in particular. John Proctor had no way of proving she had slept with him.
How deep it is? The hymen is a membrane outside of the vagina. [noparse]http://www.youngwomenshealth.org/hymen.html[/noparse] Diagram and article (possibly NWS).
Well the difference won’t be measured in metres, but an inch can make a difference, depending also on how much stretching it can take, how big the existing opening is and how well endowed the partner is (length and width).
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_depth_of_the_hymen_of_a_virgin (not a great cite, sorry, will look for a better one if asked)
Prince: “Are you sure Snow White is a virgin?”
Doctor: “Her maidenhead is intact. It just has these seven dents in it.”
There was no great scandal attached to not being a virgin; in fact about a third of the brides who married in New England were pregnant at their wedding. (There was a major scandal attached to illegitimacy but so long as you married sometime before or very soon after the birth it was pretty quickly forgotten and no big whoop.)
The crime in Proctor and Abigail’s case wasn’t fornication but adultery. John was married. Premarital sex- all that could be proven with a handy-dandy-ye-olde-hymen-check- wasn’t a huge deal, but adultery was both a sin and a crime and would have been very bad news for both of them. They wouldn’t have been killed for it but jail time and perhaps a flogging wouldn’t be out of the question and their reputations would be ruined in a tiny place where personal rep was everything. (Actually they’d probably have done what most people with ruined reps did and go down to Rhode Island, but still that’d mean selling what they had and starting over and moving was an ordeal [the word travel and the word travail are closely related].)
May or may not be relevant, but the affair twixt Proctor and Abigail was the invention of Arthur Miller and never actually happened. In real life Proctor (though he did have a pregnant wife) was about 60 and Abigail was about 12.
A bit off track, but did anybody else get the sense that Elizabeth’s illness during which John turned to Abigail was more mental (post-partem depression perhaps) than physical?
So Abigail turns out not to be a virgin. That doesn’t mean the man involved was Proctor.
It could have been Big Bird. She saw him in the courtroom after all.
teehee! 
Whoever wrote that answer is just plain wrong – it’s not within the vaginal canal, it’s on the outside, a part of the vulva. Really.
I have read somewhere* that in some times and places the hymen was intentionally and artificially penetrated by the girl’s female relatives shortly before the wedding in order to save the bride from pain on the wedding night. In some cultures they may do this on a bed and save the sheets as proof (which is biblical but I don’t believe the artificial penetration custom is biblical).
APA Citation style:
Sampiro (sometime twixt 1980s and recently), read somewhere.
Sorry, gallows fodder, I’ve broken your link so that no one clicks there accidentally. The url is still available for anyone who wants to get there via cut-and-paste. See Forum Rules, note Post #5 for further info.
Not a big deal, no warning or nothin’ like that, just trying to help avoid any possible awkwardness for those who read the SDMB at work.
Whoops, sorry about that!