To many suffragists, these arguments were complete hogwash, and they sought to dispel them as myths. But it was a restricted cause: “Votes for women” was, as a rule, understood to mean “votes for white women.” Many white suffragists, including some of the country’s leading figures in the movement, were outraged that black men had won the vote before white women. When they argued against sexist pseudoscience, they did not argue in the name of women of color.

With those arguments, suffragists sought to dismantle claims of their lesser intellectual ability with the power of prose, publishing a flurry of editorials and essays and delivering speeches at demonstrations and before Congress. “[The woman’s brain] is as rich in convolutions as is the man’s. Why should it not be? Her mother gave one half, her father gave the other half,” Mary Johnston, an author and founding member of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, wrote in The Atlantic in 1910. “Behind those two stand two men and two women; behind those four, four men and four women; behind that eight, eight men and eight women; behind that sixteen, sixteen men and sixteen women; behind that thirty-two—no use to go on … Is she deficient in mental power? Then her forbears, men and women, were so.”

To assertions of their physical weakness, they gestured to the men around them unable to enforce law with their might, whether because of their age or health. They pointed to powerful men whose small stature did not preclude them from entering politics. “Many men of Herculean powers of mind have been small and weak in body,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the most prominent American suffragists, said at the famous Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. “John Quincy Adams was a small man of but little muscular power, yet we know he had more courage than all the northern dough faces of six feet high and well proportioned that ever represented us at our Capitol.” In some cases, instead of arguing against the importance of physical strength, they demonstrated their own. They stood for hours outside the White Houses in inclement weather and withstood torture when they were jailed for picketing.

Anti-suffragists’ rhetoric did not vanish when William T. Sedgwick’s worst nightmare came true and Congress granted women the right to vote in 1919. It became diluted in the decades after, but dregs have stuck around. A century later, people continue to consider womanhood a handicap. Last year, a male physicist said at a conference that men outnumber women in physics because women are just worse at it. In 2017, Google fired a male software engineer who posted a memo to an internal message board arguing that women’s underrepresentation in the technology industry could be explained by biological differences between the sexes. And Jorgensen-Earp wonders whether perhaps a certain kind of discourse that is commonly derided today borrows from an old tradition.

“It is fun to contemplate whether minor modern irritations such as ‘mansplaining’ are based on some men’s belief that women are less mentally fit,” she says. “Or, heck, maybe they just like to hear themselves talk.”