Ellis, Man and Woman, fourth ed.  Ch.  XI.) The very name, menses ("monthlies"), is a euphemism, and most of the old scientific names for this function are similarly vague.  As regards popular feminine terminology previous to the eighteenth century, Schurig gives us fairly ample information (Parthenologia, 1729, pp. 27 et seq.).  He remarks that both in Latin and Germanic countries, menstruation was commonly designated by some term equivalent to “flowers,” because, he says, it is a blossoming that indicates the possibility of fruit.  German peasant women, he tells us, called it the rose-wreath (Rosenkrantz).  Among the other current feminine names for menstruation which he gives, some are purely fanciful; thus, the Italian women dignified the function with the title of “marchese magnifico;” German ladies, again, would use the locution, “I have had a letter,” or would say that their cousin or aunt had arrived.  These are closely similar to the euphemisms still used by women.

It should be added that euphemisms for menstruation are not confined to Europe, and are found among savages.  According to Hill Tout (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1904, p. 320; and 1905, p. 137), one of these euphemisms was “putting on the moccasin,” and in another branch of the same people, “putting the knees together,” “going outside” (in allusion to the customary seclusion at this period in a solitary hut), and so on.

It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that this process is an intensification of modesty.  It is, on the contrary, an attenuation of it.  The observances of modesty become merely a part of a vast body of rules of social etiquette, though a somewhat stringent part on account of the vague sense still persisting of a deep-lying natural basis.  It is a significant coincidence that the eighteenth century, which was marked by this new extension of the social ritual of modesty, also saw the first appearance of a new philosophic impulse not merely to analyze, but to dissolve the conception of modesty.  This took place more especially in France.

The swift rise to supremacy, during the seventeenth century, of logical and rational methods of thinking, in conjunction with the new development of geometrical and mathematical science, led in the eighteenth century to a widespread belief in France that human customs and human society ought to be founded on a strictly logical and rational basis.  It was a belief which ignored those legitimate claims of the emotional nature which the nineteenth century afterwards investigated and developed, but it was of immense service to mankind in clearing away useless prejudices and superstitions, and it culminated in the reforms of the great Revolution which most other nations have since been painfully struggling to attain.  Modesty offered a tempting field for the eighteenth century philosophic spirit to explore.