Study Niddah folio 48B with parallel Hebrew-English text, traditional commentary, and modern study tools. Free access to Babylonian Talmud online.
Although your breasts began to develop, you still did not reform your ways, and you continued to act licentiously. And furthermore, even when your breasts grew fully, you also did not reform your ways.
§ The Talmud asks: In any event, everyone, both R' Meir and the Rabbis, agrees that we rely on the lower sign. From where do we derive that we rely exclusively on the lower sign and do not require the appearance of the upper sign as well? Rav Yehuda said that Rav said, and likewise a Sage of the sc
The Talmud raises a difficulty: But one can say that although a woman’s status, like that of a man, depends on one sign, in the case of a woman she reaches majority either through this, the lower sign, or that, the upper sign. From where is it derived that it must be specifically the lower sign? T
The Talmud notes that this halakha, that the lower sign is sufficient by itself for a woman, is also taught in a baraita. R' Eliezer, son of R' Tzadok, said: This is how the rabbis would explain it in the study hall of Yavne. They said: Once the lower sign has appeared, we no longer concern ourselve
§ It is taught in a baraita, with regard to the appearance of signs indicating puberty in young women, that Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says: In the case of young women who reside in cities, the lower sign appears more quickly than the upper sign, because they frequent the bathhouses, which stimula