One of the more famous texts that addresses this very thing is "How It Feels To Be The Husband Of A Suffragette," published in the January 1914 issue of Everybody's Magazine by an anonymous author. It was recently republished in Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946, which attributes its authorship to Arthur Raymond Brown, husband of Gertrude Foster Brown.

Arthur Brown was an artist an advertising executive who was born in 1865. He went by the nickname "Ray" and married Gertrude in 1893, after she had already become known for her piano skills. At the time, she was teaching at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and he was working at the Chicago Evening Post. About or shortly after the turn of the 20th century, they moved to New York City, where Gertrude Brown became president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association.

An excerpt follows, describing what it was like for him to march in a suffragette parade:

"Out in the middle of Fifth Avenue's width we felt a heap isolated; it even went farther than that ─ we felt ostracized. Tagging after the girls ─ that's what we were doing; and nobody would let us forget it.

If you can go back to your kid days and remember how the gang at some time sat in judgment on you and, for alleged failure on your part to shine in the full glory of a budding male, rounded up on you, called you 'cry baby,' and callously bade you 'go play with the girls,' you'll get a little of the sensation we had out there, unchaperoned, entirely surrounded by empty asphalt, with two or three hundred thousand people earnestly cracking their larynxes calling us 'sis' or 'henpeck.'"

I cannot speak generally, but in New Zealand a lot of men supported women's suffrage, including the husbands of many of the suffragettes. The support of men was critical, because women could not enact suffrage in their own right.

It was a different time. Feminism wasn't a thing. Women's suffrage was supported for many reasons, but one of the biggest was that women were presumed to be more moral, and to be more likely to oppose alcohol. Kate Sheppard is far and away the most famous NZ suffragette; she was a key figure in the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and these sorts of connections were critical to NZ achieving universal women's suffrage before anyone else, in 1893.

Sheppard's story is typical. The suffragettes often came from extremely devout families. Some of the newer strands of Christianity emphasised equality, and they had strong stands on alcohol and family.

The suffrage boosters were right; women were more likely to vote for prohibition in referendums. In 1919, it looked like prohibition had won until the overseas votes came through. These were overwhelmingly from soldiers who had been involved in World War I, and were overwhelmingly opposed to prohibition. The women who had been left at home had predominantly voted in favour of prohibition.