We shall speak here only of the honesty of the sort of women the courts
have most to do with, and in this regard there is little to give us joy.
Not to be honest, and to lie, are two different things; the latter is
positive, the former negative, the dishonest person does not tell the
truth, the liar tells the untruth. It is dishonest to suppress a portion
of the truth, to lead others into mistakes, to fail to justify
appearances, and to make use of appearances. The dishonest person may
not have said a single untrue word and still have introduced many more
difficulties, confusions and deceptions than the liar. He is for this
reason more dangerous than the latter. Also, because his conduct is more
difficult to uncover and because he is more difficult to conquer than
the liar. Dishonesty is, however, a specially feminine characteristic,
and in men occurs only when they are effeminate. Real manliness and
dishonesty are concepts which can not be united. Hence, the popular
proverb says, “Women always tell the truth, but not the whole truth.”
And this is more accurate than the accusation of many writers, that
women lie. I do not believe that the criminal courts can verify the
latter accusation. I do not mean that women never lie--they lie
enough--but they do not lie more than men do, and none of us would
attribute lying to women as a sexual trait. To do so, would be to
confuse dishonesty with lying.
It would be a mistake to deal too sternly in court with the dishonesty
of women, for we ourselves and social conditions are responsible for
much of it. We dislike to use the right names of things and choose
rather to suggest, to remain in embarrassed silence, or to blush. Hence,
it is too much to ask that this round-aboutness should be set aside in
the courtroom, where circumstances make straight talking even more
difficult. According to Lombroso,[272] women lie because of their
weaknesses, and because of menstruation and pregnancy, for which they
have in conversation to substitute other illnesses; because of the
feeling of shame, because of the sexual selection which compels them to
conceal age, defects, diseases; because finally of their desire to be
interesting, their suggestibility, and their small powers of judgment.
All these things tend to make them lie, and then as mothers they have to
deceive their children about many things. Indeed, they are themselves no
more than children, Lombroso concludes. But it is a mistake to suppose
that these conditions lead to lying, for women generally acquire
silence, some other form of action, or the negative propagation of
error. But this is essentially dishonesty. To assert that deception,
lying, have become physiological properties of women is, therefore,
wrong. According to Lotze, women hate analysis and hence can not
distinguish between the true and the false, but then women hate
analysis only when it is applied to themselves. A woman does not want
to be analyzed herself simply because analysis would reveal a great deal
of dishonesty; she is therefore a stranger to thorough-going honest
activity. But for this men are to blame. Nobody, as Flaubert says, tells
women the truth. And when once they hear it they fight it as something
extraordinary. They are not even honest with themselves. But this is not
only true in general; it is true also in particular cases which the
court room sees. We ourselves make honesty difficult to women before the
court. Of course, I do not mean that to avoid this we are to be rude and
shameless in our conversation with women, but it is certain that we
compel them to be dishonest by our round-about handling of every
ticklish subject. Any half-experienced criminal justice knows that much
more progress can be made by simple and absolutely open discussion. A
highly educated woman with whom I had a frank talk about such a matter,
said at the end of this very painful sitting, “Thank God, that you spoke
frankly and without prudery--I was very much afraid that by foolish
questions you might compel me to prudish answers and hence, to complete
dishonesty.”
We have led women so far by our indirection that according to Stendhal,
to be honest, is to them identical with appearing naked in public.
Balzac asks, “Have you ever observed a lie in the attitude and manner of
woman? Deceit is as easy to them as falling snow in heaven.” But this is
true only if he means dishonesty. It is not true that it is easy for
women really to lie. I do not know whether this fact can be proven, but
I am sure the feminine malease in lying can be observed. The play of
features, the eyes, the breast, the attitude, betrays almost always even
the experienced female offender. Now, nothing can reveal the play of her
essential dishonesty. If a man once confesses, he confesses with less
constraint than a woman, and he is less likely, even if he is very bad,
to take advantage of false favorable appearances, while woman accepts
them with the semblance of innocence. If a man has not altogether given
a complete version, his failure is easy to recognize by his hesitation,
but the opinions of woman always have a definite goal, even though she
should tell us only a tenth of what she might know and say.
Even her simplest affirmation or denial is not honest. Her “no” is not
definite; e.g., her “no” to a man’s demands. Still further, when a man
affirms or denies and there is some limitation to his assertion. He
either announces it expressly or the more trained ear recognizes its
presence in the failure to conclude, in a hesitation of the tone. But
the woman says “yes” and “no,” even when only a small portion of one or
the other asserts a truth behind which she can hide herself, and this is
a matter to keep in mind in the courtroom.
Also the art of deception or concealment depends on dishonesty rather
than on pure deceit, because it consists much more in the use of
whatever is at hand, and in suppression of material, than on direct
lies. So, when the proverb says that a woman was ill only three times
during the course of the year, but each time for four months, it will be
unjust to say that she intentionally denies a year-long illness. She
does not, but as a matter of fact, she is ill at least thirteen times a
year, and besides, her weak physique causes her to feel frequently
unwell. So she does not lie about her illness. But then she does not
immediately announce her recovery and permits people to nurse and
protect her even when she has no need of it. Perhaps she does so
because, in the course of the centuries, she found it necessary to
magnify her little troubles in order to protect herself against brutal
men, and had, therefore, to forge the weapon of dishonesty. So
Schopenhauer agrees: “Nature has given women only one means of
protection and defence--hypocrisy; this is congenital with them, and the
use of it is as natural as the animal’s use of its claws. Women feel
they have a certain degree of justification for their hypocrisy.”
With this hypocrisy we have, as lawyers, to wage a constant battle.
Quite apart from the various ills and diseases which women assume before
the judge, everything else is pretended; innocence, love of children,
spouses, and parents; pain at loss and despair at reproaches; a breaking
heart at separation; and piety,--in short, whatever may be useful. This
subjects the examining justice to the dangers and difficulties of being
either too harsh, or being fooled. He can save himself much trouble by
remembering that in this simulation there is much dishonesty and few
lies. The simulation is rarely thorough-going, it is an intensification
of something actually there.
And now think of the tears which are wept before every man, and not
least, before the criminal judge. Popular proverbs tend to undervalue,
often to distrust tearful women. Mantegazza[273] points out that every
man over thirty can recall scenes in which it was difficult to determine
how much of a woman’s tears meant real pain, and how much was
voluntarily shed. In the notion that tears represent a mixture of poetry
and truth, we shall find the correct solution. It would be interesting
to question female virtuosos in tears (when women see that they can
really teach they are quite often honest) about the matter. The
questioner would inevitably learn that it is impossible to weep at will
and without reason. Only a child can do that. Tears require a definite
reason and a certain amount of time which may be reduced by great
practice to a minimum, but even that minimum requires some duration.
Stories in novels and comic papers in which women weep bitterly about a
denied new coat, are fairy tales; in point of fact the lady begins by
feeling hurt because her husband refused to buy her the thing, then she
thinks that he has recently refused to buy her a dress, and to take her
to the theatre; that at the same time he looks unfriendly and walks away
to the window; that indeed, she is really a pitiful, misunderstood,
immeasurably unhappy woman, and after this crescendo, which often occurs
presto prestissimo, the stream of tears breaks through. Some tiny
reason, a little time, a little auto-suggestion, and a little
imagination,--these can keep every woman weeping eternally, and these
tears can always leave us cold. Beware, however, of the silent tears of
real pain, especially of hurt innocence. These must not be mistaken for
the first. If they are, much harm may be done, for these tears, if they
do not represent penitence for guilt, are real evidences of innocence. I
once believed that the surest mark of such tears was the deceiving
attempt to beat down and suppress them; an attempt which is made with
elementary vigor. But even this attempt to fight them off is frequently
not quite real.
As with tears, so with fainting. The greater number of fainting fits are
either altogether false, or something between fainting and wakefulness.
Women certainly, whether as prisoners or witnesses, are often very
uncomfortable in court, and if the discomfort is followed immediately by
illness, dizziness, and great fear, fainting is natural. If only a
little exaggeration, auto-suggestion, relaxation, and the attempt to
dodge the unpleasant circumstance are added, then the fainting fit is
ready to order, and the effect is generally in favor of the fainter.
Although it is wrong to assume beforehand that fainting is a comedy, it
is necessary to beware of deception.
An interesting question, which, thank heaven, does not concern the
criminal justice, is whether women can keep their word. When a
criminalist permits a woman to promise not to tell anybody else of her
testimony, or some similar naïveté, he may settle his account with his
conscience. The criminalist must not accept promises at all, and he is
only getting his reward when women fool him. The fact is, that woman
does not know the definite line between right and wrong. Or better, she
draws the line in a different way; sometimes more sharply, but in the
main more broadly than man, and in many cases she does not at all
understand that certain distinctions are not permitted. This occurs
chiefly where the boundaries are really unstable, or where it is not
easy to understand the personality of the sufferer. Hence, it is always
difficult to make woman understand that state, community, or other
public weal, must in and for themselves be sacred against all harm. The
most honest and pious woman is not only without conscience with regard
to dodging her taxes, she also finds great pleasure in having done so
successfully. It does not matter what it is she smuggles, she is glad to
smuggle successfully, but smuggling is not, as might be supposed, a
sport for women, though women need more nervous excitement and sport
than men. Their attitude shows that they are really unable to see that
they are running into danger because they are violating the law. When
you tell them that the state is justified in forbidding smuggling, they
always answer that they have smuggled such a very little, that nobody
would miss the duties. Then the interest in smugglers and
smuggling-stories is exceedingly great. We once had a girl who was born
on the boundary between Italy and Austria. Her father was a notorious
smuggler, the chief of a band that brought coffee and silk across the
border. He grew rich in the trade, but he lost everything in an
especially great venture, and was finally shot by the customs-officers
at the boundary. If you could see with what interest, spirit, and
keenness the girl described her father’s dubious courses you would
recognize that she had not the slightest idea that there was anything
wrong in what he was doing.
Women, moreover, do not understand the least regulation. I frequently
have had cases in which even intelligent women could not see why it was
wrong to make a “small” change in a public register; why it was wrong to
give, in a foreign city, a false name at the hotel; or why the police
might forbid the shaking of dust-cloths over the heads of pedestrians,
even from her “own” house; why the dog must be kept chained; and what
good such “vexations” could do, anyway.
Again, tiny bits of private property are not safe from women. Note how
impossible it is to make women understand that private property is
despoiled when flowers or fruit are plucked from a private garden. The
point is so small, and as a rule, the property owner makes no
objections, but it must be granted that he has the right to do so. Then
their tendency to steal, in the country, bits of ground and boundaries
is well known. Most of the boundary cases we have, involved the activity
of some woman.
Even in their own homes women do not conceive property too rigidly. They
appropriate pen, paper, pencils, clothes, etc., without having any idea
of replacing what they have taken away. This may be confirmed by anybody
whose desk is not habitually sacrosanct, and he will agree that it is
not slovenliness, but defective sense of property that causes women to
do this, for even the most consummate housekeepers do so. This defective
property-sense is most clearly shown in the notorious fact that women
cheat at cards. According to Lombroso, an educated, much experienced
woman told him in confidence that it is difficult for her sex not to
cheat at cards. Croupiers in gambling halls know things much worse. They
say that they must watch women much more than men because they are not
only more frequent cheaters, but more expert. Even at croquet and
lawn-tennis girls are unspeakably smart about cheating if they can
thereby put their masculine opponents impudently at a disadvantage.
We find many women among swindlers, gamblers, and counterfeiters; and
moreover, we have the evidence of experienced housewives, that the
cleverest and most useful servants are frequently thievish. What is
instructive in all these facts is the indefiniteness of the boundary
between honesty and dishonesty, even in the most petty cases. The defect
in the sense of property with regard to little things explains how many
a woman became a criminal--the road she wandered on grew, step by step,
more extended. There being no definite boundary, it was inevitable that
women should go very far, and when the educated woman does nothing more
than to steal a pencil from her husband and to cheat at whist, her sole
fortune is that she does not get opportunities or needs for more serious
mistakes. The uneducated, poverty-stricken woman has, however, both
opportunity and need, and crime becomes very easy to her. Our life is
rich in experiment and our will too weak not to fail under the
exigencies of existence, if, at the outset, a slightest deviation from
the straight and narrow road is not avoided. If the justice is in doubt
whether a woman has committed a great crime against property, his study
will concern, not the deed, but the time when the woman was in
different circumstances and had no other opportunity to do wrong than
mere nibbling at and otherwise foolish abstractions from other people’s
property. If this inclination can be proved, then there is justification
for at least suspecting her of the greater crime.
The relation of women to such devilment becomes more instructive when it
has to be discovered through woman witnesses. As a rule, there is no
justification for the assumption that people are inclined to excuse
whatever they find themselves guilty of. On the contrary, we are
inclined to punish others most harshly where we ourselves are most
guilty. And there is still another side to the matter. When an honest,
well-conducted woman commits petty crimes, she does not consider them as
crimes, she is unaware of their immorality, and it would be illogical
for her to see as a crime in others that which she does not recognize as
a crime in herself. It is for this reason that she tends to excuse her
neighbor’s derelictions. Now, when we try to find out from feminine
witnesses facts concerning the objects on which we properly lay stress,
they do not answer and cause us to make mistakes. What woman thinks is
mere “sweet-tooth” in her servant girl, is larceny in criminal law; what
she calls “pin-money,” we call deceit, or violation of trust; for the
man whom the woman calls “the dragon,” we find in many cases quite
different terms. And this feminine attitude is not Christian charity,
but ignorance of the law, and with this ignorance we have to count when
we examine witnesses. Of course, not only concerning some theft by a
servant girl, but always when we are trying to understand some human
weakness.
From honesty to loyalty is but a step. Often these traits lie side by
side or overlap each other. Now, the criminal justice has, more
frequently than appears, to deal with feminine loyalty. Problems of
adultery are generally of subordinate significance only, but this
loyalty or disloyalty often plays the most important rôle in trials of
all conceivable crimes, and the whole problem of evidence takes a
different form according to the assumption that this loyalty does, or
does not, exist. Whether it is the murder of a husband, doubtful
suicide, physical mutilation, theft, perversion of trust, arson, the
case takes a different form if feminine disloyalty can be proved. The
rare reference to this important premise in the presentation of evidence
is due to the fact that we are ignorant of its significance, that its
determinative factors are hidden, and finally that its presentation is
as a rule difficult.
Public opinion on feminine loyalty is not flattering. Diderot asserts
that there is no loyal woman who has not ceased being so, at least, in
her imagination. Of course this does not mean much, for all of us have
ideally committed many sins, but if Diderot is right, one may assume a
feminine inclination to disloyalty. Most responsible for this is, of
course, the purely sexual character of woman, but we must not do her the
injustice, and ourselves the harm, of supposing that this character is
the sole regulative principle; the illimitable feminine need for change
is also responsible to a great degree. I doubt whether it could be
proved in any collection of cases worth naming that a woman grew
disloyal although her sexual needs were small; but that her sex does so
is certain, and thence we must seek other reasons for their disloyalty.
The love of change is fundamental and may be observed in recorded
criminal cases. “Even educated women,” says Goltz,[274] “can not bear
continuous and uniform good fortune, and feel an inconceivable impulse
to devilment and foolishness in order to get some variety in life.” Now
it will be much easier for the judge to determine whether the woman in
the case had at the critical time an especial inclination to this
“devilment,” than to discover whether her own husband was sexually
insufficient, or whatever similar secrets might be involved.
If woman, however, once has the impulse to seek variety, and the
harmless and permissible changes she may provide herself are no longer
sufficient or are lacking, the movement of her daily life takes a
questionable direction. Then there is a certain tendency to deceit which
is able to bring its particular consequences to bear. A woman has
married, let us say, for love, or for money, for spite, to please her
parents, etc., etc. Now come moments in her life in which she reflects
concerning “her” reason for marriage, and the cause of these moments
will almost always be her husband, i.e., he may have been ill-mannered,
have demanded too much, have refused something, have neglected her,
etc., and thus have wounded her so that her mood, when thinking of the
reason of her marriage, is decidedly bad, and she begins to doubt
whether her love was really so strong, whether the money was worth the
trouble, whether she ought not to have opposed her parents, etc. And
suppose she had waited, might she not have done better? Had she not
deserved better? Every step in her musing takes her farther from her
husband. A man is nothing to a woman to whom he is not everything, and
if he is nothing he deserves no especial consideration, and if he is
undeserving, a little disloyalty is not so terrible, and finally, the
little disloyalty gradually and naturally and smoothly leads to
adultery, and adultery to a chain of crimes. That this process is not a
thousand times more frequent, is merely due to the accident that the
right man is not at hand during these so-called weak moments. Millions
of women who boast of their virtue, and scorn others most nobly, have to
thank their boasted virtue only to this accident. If the right man had
been present at the right time they would have had no more ground for
pride. There is only a simple and safe method for discovering whether a
woman is loyal to her husband--lead her to say whether her husband
neglects her. Every woman who complains that her husband neglects her is
an adulteress or in the way of becoming one, for she seeks the most
thrifty, the really sound reason which would justify adultery. How close
she has come to this sin is easily discoverable from the degree of
intensity with which she accuses her husband.
Besides adultery, the disloyalty of widow and of bride, there is also
another sense in which disloyalty may be important. The first is
important only when we have to infer some earlier condition, and we are
likely to commit injustice if we judge the conduct of the wife by the
conduct of the widow. As a rule there are no means of comparison. In
numerous cases the wife loves her husband and is loyal to him even
beyond the grave, but these cases always involve older women whom lust
no longer affects. If the widow is at all young, pretty, and
comparatively rich, she forgets her husband. If she has forgotten him,
if after a very short time she has again found a lover and a husband,
whether for “the sake of the poor children,” or because “my first one,
of blessed memory, desired it,” or because “the second and the first
look so much alike,” or whatever other reason she might give, there is
still no ground for supposing that she did not love her first husband,
was disloyal to him, robbed and murdered him. She might have borne the
happiest relations with him; but he is dead, and a dead man is no man.
There are, again, cases in which the almost immediate marriage of a
new-made widow implies all kinds of things, and often reveals in the
person of the second husband the murderer of the first. When suspicions
of such a situation occur, it is obviously necessary to go very slowly,
but the first thing of importance is to keep tabs carefully on the
second husband. It is exceedingly self-contradictory in a man to marry a
woman he knows to have murdered her first husband--but if he had cared
only about being her lover there would not have been the necessity of
murdering the first.
The opposite of this type is anticipatory disloyalty of a woman who
marries a man in order to carry on undisturbed her love-affair with
another. That there are evil consequences in most cases is easy to see.
Such marriages occur very frequently among peasants. The woman, e.g., is
in love with the son of a wealthy widower. The son owns nothing, or the
father refuses his permission, so the woman makes a fool of the father
by marrying him and carries on her amour with the son, doubly sinful.
Instead of a son, the lover may be only a servant, and then the couple
rob the husband thoroughly--especially if the second wife has no
expectations of inheritance, there being children of a former marriage.
Variations on this central theme occur as the person of the lover
changes to neighbor, cousin, friend, etc., but the type is obvious, and
it is necessary to consider its possibilities whenever suspicion arises.
The disloyalty of a bride--well, we will not bother with this poetical
subject. Everybody knows how merciless a girl can be, how she leaves her
lover for practical, or otherwise ignoble reasons, and everybody knows
the consequences of such things.[275]