Arguments against such powers bear a striking resemblance to the old argument against universal suffrage: "It's a nice idea in theory, but it's just not practical".
(Once women were manning the military production lines, as they were in factories throughout Europe, it was harder to argue against universal suffrage).
Arguments for slavery and segregation and expulsion of Native Americans and against woman suffrage all contended, in various ways, for the honoring, or at least acceptance, of cultural differences.
She was against female suffrage on the grounds that "men and women help one another because they are different, have different gifts and different spheres".
At first he urged acceptance of the reconstituted Union and acquiescence in the policies of Reconstruction, but he soon came out in opposition, particularly against black suffrage.
One of the pleasing curiosities of Suffragette is that Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Edith, a frustrated doctor-cum-Suffragette chemist, is actually granddaughter to Violet Asquith, daughter to the prime minister at the time the film is set – and Violet was vocally against women's suffrage.
Mary Humphry Ward, a novelist, was the first president of the anti-suffrage league, and argued the case against women's suffrage at debates at Newnham and Girton colleges, Cambridge.
Most of the women who led the fights for abolition and suffrage, against lynching, and for secondary education, were unmarried as were the women who pioneered new fields such as nursing and medicine.
And God knows, we argued against women's suffrage on the editorial page of The New York Times, so we should be humble every time we write one of these about whether we're actually right.
