Women are present in this 1863 depiction of a New York City draft riot.
This old print article from the July 19, 1899 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle is a special kind of chauvinistic crazy. New York in the 19th century was prone to riots of all kind (gang, labor, race, draft, drunken, etc.), and I guess this was some sort of op-ed warning to the fairer sex: Do not get involved or else! I would further have to assume one of the editors had an argument with his wife that morning. The piece in full:
“No man wishes to hurt a woman. No man will intentionally hurt one. But the kind of women who unsex themselves to mix with rioters and who throw stones and bottles at our motormen and passengers on our street cars incur danger to their lives. People who are assailed by overwhelming numbers do not and can not cooly select the enemies whom they will shoot or club, and if, in striking at random here and there, a policeman hits a woman’s head, the blame attaches to the woman, not the policeman.
During this strike in Brooklyn several harridans from the tenements have mixed with the loafers and the rowdies who have blocked the cars and attacked the passengers. They believe their skirts defend them. They have yelled profane and obscene epithets at the men who were trying to earn an honest living and have encouraged the disorderly element with voice and example.
When a woman debases herself to companion with drunkards, ruffians and dynamite sneaks, when she teaches her children to defy our ordinances and sets examples to them of disorder and brutality, the outraged law can hardly regard her as a woman at all. The same law sent one woman to the electric chair awhile ago for murder. Her case created a great deal of maudlinism though it deserved not a jot of it, for her crime was premeditated, cold-blooded and devilish. The same law may require harshness in its dealings with all rioters and would-be slayers of fellow creatures, whether they wear beards or not. The place for women in a time like this is at home.”
