Life & Wisdom Quote by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Gerould flips a familiar slur into an indictment of the social order that produces it. The line starts by borrowing the language of polite certainty - "surely" - only to weaponize it, suggesting that what passes for common sense about women's "veracity" is really a misread symptom of coercion. If women are branded as less truthful, she argues, it's not because they're constitutionally slippery; it's because they're tasked with maintaining the fictions everyone else benefits from.

The phrase "burden of conventional falsehood" does heavy lifting. "Conventional" makes the lie sound respectable, even mandatory: the small, sanctioned deceptions that keep dinner parties civil, reputations intact, marriages functional, and male authority unruffled. Gerould's subtext is that gendered morality is a rigged audit. Men get to define truth as a virtue, then outsource the day-to-day work of hypocrisy to women: smoothing over insult, masking desire, softening bad news, feigning ignorance, performing cheer, projecting purity. When those performances are later exposed, the performer is blamed, not the scriptwriter.

The context matters. Writing in an early 20th-century Anglo-American culture of strict etiquette and narrowing roles, Gerould is tracing how "character" gets socially manufactured. Her sentence is brisk but accusatory: the charge of female dishonesty functions as discipline, while the social demand for female tact functions as training. It's a neat piece of cultural criticism disguised as a genteel observation, which is exactly her point about how power prefers its truths delivered.