Women, many news outlets have told us, are stars in today's elections. Female voters "could decide a number of important state races across the country." Democrats are hoping for a high turnout of women today; so, it seems, are Republicans.

Given all this emphasis on the 2014 ladyvoter, it's easy to forget that, for much of the U.S.'s existence, many women's relationship with voting involved simply hoping to do it one day. The 19th Amendment wasn't ratified until August 1920; that was accomplished only after a long fight—by women, and also by men—to get the vote.

There were also women who argued against suffrage, on grounds of both bureaucratic efficiency and morality. One of them was Josephine Dodge, the head of the National Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage. (This is the group that, as Feministing points out, once warned that giving women the vote would put the government under "petticoat rule.") In 1894, the NAOWS put out a pamphlet with the sober title "Some Reasons Why We Oppose Votes for Women": an 11-point treatise making its case against female suffrage.

It looked like this:

Library of Congress

From today's perspective, the pamphlet's logic is absurd. And to many at the time, as well, women opposing their own enfranchisement was ripe for the mocking. Which was why, in 1915, the suffragette Alice Duer Miller wrote a response to it. She called her own treatise "Why We Oppose Votes for Men."