This external opening of the feminine genital passage with its two enclosing lips is now generally called the vulva.  It would appear that originally (as by Celsus and Pliny) this term included the womb, also, but when the term “uterus” came into use “vulva” was confined (as its sense of folding doors suggests that it should be) to the external entrance.  The classic term cunnus for the external genitals was chiefly used by the poets; it has been the etymological source of various European names for this region, such as the old French con, which has now, however, disappeared from literature while even in popular usage it has given place to lapin and similar terms.  But there is always a tendency, marked in most parts of the world, for the names of the external female parts to become indecorous.  Even in classic antiquity this part was the pudendum, the part to be ashamed of, and among ourselves the mass of the population, still preserving the traditions of primitive times, continue to cherish the same notion.

The anatomy, anthropology, folk-lore, and terminology of the external and to some extent the internal feminine sexual region may be studied in the following publications, among others:  Ploss, Das Weib, vol. i, Chapter VI; Hyrtl, Topographisches Anatomie, vol. ii, and other publications by the same scholarly anatomist; W.J.  Stewart Mackay, History of Ancient Gynaecology, especially pp. 244-250; R. Bergh, “Symbolae ad Cognitionem Genitalium Externorum Foeminearum” (in Danish), Hospitalstidende, August, 1894; and also in Monatshefte fuer Praktische Dermatologie, 1897.  D.S.  Lamb, “The Female External Genital Organs,” New York Journal of Gynaecology, August, 1894; R.L.  Dickinson, “Hypertrophies of the Labia Minora and Their Significance,” American Gynecology, September, 1902; Kryptadia (in various languages), vol. viii, pp. 3-11, 11-13, and many other passages.  Several of Schurig’s works (especially Gynaecologia, Muliebria, and Parthenologia) contain full summaries of the statements of the early writers.

The external or larger lips, like the mons veneris, are specifically human in their full development, for in the anthropoid apes they are small as is the mons, and in the lower apes absent altogether; they are, moreover, larger in the white than in the other human races.  Thus in the negro, and to a less degree in the Japanese (Wernich) and the Javanese (Scherzer) they are less developed than in women of white race.  The greater lips develop in the foetus later than the lesser lips, which are thus at first uncovered; this condition thus constitutes an infantile state which occasionally (in less than 2 per cent. of cases, according to Bergh) persists in the adult.  Their generally accepted name, labia majora, is comparatively modern.[82]