Yes, there were. And at the beginning of the women's suffrage movement, suffragettes were viewed by most women as oddities rather than heroic liberators.
Basically, centuries ago, due to the technological and economical environment, the family as a unit was much more important than how many people view it today. It was close to impossible to survive (and especially to lead a decent life) alone, especially for a woman. There was no male conspiracy to oppress women. It's just how society formed to optimally face the challenges of their own time period. There were many women during history who had important roles in society, leading back to medieval and even ancient times.
Women during the suffragette movement who were against women's suffrage were not just religious fanatics. There were many well-educated and influential women who were against women entering the realm of politics.
Here is an interesting article about it.
Most of the female leaders of the anti-suffrage movement, says
Goodier, “were earnest, intelligent, often educated and professional
women who sincerely believed that women, and the nation-state, would
suffer when women achieved political equality with men.”
Central to the movement was the then-prevalent notion that in order to
be functional, prosperous and pleasant, American society required men
and women to operate in separate spheres of influence: public life for
men, and domestic life for women. These realms aligned with what were
regarded as the inherent natural strengths of each sex. Women, who
were considered nurturers, moral guardians, and peacekeepers, were
expected to guide the moral development of the next generation by
presiding over family and the home. (“Women is queen, indeed,” wrote
Roman Catholic Cardinal James Gibbons, quoted in an anti-suffrage
pamphlet, “but her empire is the domestic kingdom.”)
“Most nineteenth-century commentators saw strict differentiation
between the roles of women and men as crucial to the proper
functioning of the nation,” writes Goodier in No Votes for Women.
“Anti-suffragists subscribed to the belief that women’s power base,
the private home, was equivalent to the masculine power base in the
public realm.”
When we analyze an earlier time period, we have to take care to also study it from their own perspective, taking into account all the socioeconomic factors and all the constraints of the level of technology they had back then, and its effects on daily life. Judging them solely from a modern, (or even utopian) viewpoint only leads to finding them either bizarre or evil, just like how they would view us if they didn't understand all the context which made our current civilization look like it is.
