A very serious question for the men here at DU:

[dmallind]

117. Tradition mostly

I don't think it was a particularly discrete decision along the lines of a carte blanche design. It was instead predictable small c conservative resistance to change. There is a reason that a pre-amendment map of women's suffrage rights was much more blank in the established East coast and Ohio Valley and much more filled in in the younger former frontier states. The more comfortable you are with the way things have been for XX years, the less you seek or welcome change.

You also have to remember that women did not unanimously seek suffrage nor did men unanimously seek to deny it to them. A lot of the blue-blooded matriarchs didn't want to dilute the influence they exerted on husbands and sons by letting their maids vote too.

Certainly sexism played a part. The idea that women are there to be decorative rather then powerful is not dead now let alone nine decades ago.

About the only specific issue I recall from my distant and not all that expansive reading on the history of the period is that the Temperance and Suffrage movements had significant overlap, and some feared that women voting would lead to prohibition. There was a fairly significant Freethought component to it too, which probably antagonized some as well.