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Women in the Courts.
AS WITNESSES Women appear in the criminal courts constantly as witnesses, although less frequently as complainants and defendants.

As complainants are always witnesses, and as defendants may, and in point of fact generally do become so, whatever 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.