2. The Voting Booth Is No Place For Women
Voting booths in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were reportedly places of common, indecent behavior. Unlike today, when people can go in privately and cast their ballot in secret, they were more akin to public forums that could turn into free-for-alls akin to bar brawls. They were indeed no place for decent, kind, upright, virtuous women, especially not when the men engaging in said brawls were putting their women on such a high pedestal.
Of course, some suffragettes were keen enough to notice that the men who engaged in indecent, mundane behavior at the polls were the same men that they had to live with every day of the year. Some other suffragettes noted that if men were so emotional and sensitive as to engage in fights in the public forum and voting booth, the places where democracy and decency should be upheld, then women, not men, should be the ones voting in the first place.
The notion that women shouldn’t subject themselves to the hardships of the voting booth, of course, is a play on the idea that women should content themselves with staying at home. Perhaps the men were getting into fights as a cover to keep the polls as a men’s club and keep the women out.