Three girls from a Cross River, N.Y., high school were serving a one-day suspension Wednesday for saying the word "vagina" during a reading of The Vagina Monologues.

The students — Megan Reback, Elan Stahl and Hannah Levinson — used the word Friday evening during a public reading at John Jay High School, a public high school in a New York city suburb.

School principal Richard Leprine said the girls were being punished because they disobeyed an order not to use the word.

It was not appropriate at a community event open to children, he said.

Reback, an honour student, said she and her friends decided to say "vagina" during the feminist play because "it wasn't crude and it wasn't inappropriate and it was very real and very pure."

Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, has jumped to their defence, saying the girls were right for "standing up for art and against censorship."

"Don't we want our children to resist authority when it's not appropriate and wise?" she said Tuesday.

'It's a body part!'

"So what if children were to hear the word? Would that be terrible? We're not talking about plutonium here, or acid rain, a word that destroys lives. It's a body part!"

The Vagina Monologues, a play about various women's thoughts on sexual subjects, had a lengthy run off-Broadway beginning in 1996.

Readings of the play are a common fund-raiser for sexual assault and battered women's centres because Ensler suspends royalty payments for groups that combat violence against women.

The girls took turns reading an excerpt from the play, then said the offending passage together.

"My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women's army," they read. "I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina's country."

Reback said there were no children in the audience when they went ahead with the reading.