generalizations are possible regarding women in courts of law
can most easily be drawn from their characteristics as givers
of testimony. Roughly speaking, women exhibit about the same
idiosyncrasies and limitations in the witness-chair as the
opposite sex, and at first thought one would be apt to say
that it would be fruitless and absurd to attempt to predicate
any general principles in regard to their testimony, but a
careful study of female witnesses as a whole will result in
the inevitable conclusion that their evidence has virtues and
limitations peculiar to itself.

The ancient theory that woman was man's inferior showed
itself in the tendency to reject, or at least to regard with
suspicion, her evidence in legal matters.

"The following law," says W. M. Best, "is attributed to Moses
by Josephus: `Let the testimony of women not be received on
account of the levity and audacity of their sex'; a law which
looks apocryphal, but which, even if genuine, could not have
been of universal application.... The law of ancient Rome,
though admitting their testimony in general, refused it in
certain cases. The civil canon laws of mediaeval Europe seem
to have carried the exclusion much further. Mascardus says:
'Feminis plerumque omnino non creditur, et id dumtaxat, quod
sunt feminae qua ut plurimum solent esse fraudulentre
fallaces, et dolosae' [Generally speaking, no credence at all
is given to women, and for this reason, because they are
women, who are usually deceitful, untruthful, and treacherous
in the very highest degree.] And Lancelottus, in his
'Institutiones Juris Canonici,' lays it down in the most