of
dissimulation and that economic independence will deprive deceit--which is
always the resort of the weak--of whatever moral justification it may
possess. Here, however, it is necessary to speak with caution or we may be
unjust to women. It must be remarked that in the sphere of sex men also
are often the weak, and are therefore apt to resort to the refuge of the
weak. With the recognition of that fact we may also recognize that
deception in women has been the cause of much of the age-long blunders of
the masculine mind in the contemplation of feminine ways. Men have
constantly committed the double error of overlooking the dissimulation of
women and of over-estimating it. This fact has always served to render
more difficult still the inevitably difficult course of women through the
devious path of sexual behavior. Pepys, who represents so vividly and so
frankly the vices and virtues of the ordinary masculine mind, tells how
one day when he called to see Mrs. Martin her sister Doll went out for a
bottle of wine and came back indignant because a Dutchman had pulled her
into a stable and tumbled and tossed her. Pepys having been himself often
permitted to take liberties with her, it seemed to him that her
indignation with the Dutchman was "the best instance of woman's falseness
in the world."[307] He assumes without question that a woman who has
accorded the privilege of familiarity to a man she knows and, one hopes,
respects, would be prepared to accept complacently the brutal attentions
of the first drunken stranger she meets in the street.

It was the assumption of woman's falseness which led the ultra-masculine
Pepys into a sufficiently absurd error. At this point, indeed, we
encounter what has seemed to some a serious obstacle to the full moral
responsibility of women. Dissimulation, Lombroso and Ferrero argue, is in
woman "almost physiological," and they give various grounds for this
conclusion.[308] The theologians, on their side, have reached a similar
conclusion. "A confessor must not immediately believe a woman's words,"
says Father Gury, "for women are habitually inclined to lie."[309] This
tendency, which seems to be commonly believed to affect women as a sex,
however free from it a vast number of individual women are, may be said,
and with truth, to be largely the result of the subjection of women and
therefore likely to disappear as that subjection disappears. In so far,
however, as it is "almost physiologic