Gauntlet

…Misrepresentation was only one of the ways the efforts of the suffragettes – a name bestowed by the press in another attempt to diminish them – were belittled. The weight of the establishment found the campaign for women’s votes incomprehensible and the press faithfully echoed, and perpetuated, its view. Suffragettes, particularly militant ones, were depicted as alien creatures, sad misfits unable to capture a husband.

…Three generations later, as research by Women in Journalism has repeatedly found, women are still too often reported and judged (by women, as well as by men) against non-existent stereotypes, which sometimes seem only marginally more subtle than the suggestion of lesbianism that underlay Edwardian accounts of the suffragettes.

— From here