A preoccupation with virginity also arose with use of the plough and the gendered division of labor that put women below men. Anthropologist Shere Ortner has observed that female chastity literally has a monetary value in some highly stratified societies where a low-ranking family’s only strategy to move up may be a daughter’s marriage into a higher-ranking family. And so “enforcement of virginity…becomes a family affair guarded violently by men and mythopoetically by women,”
