Doane was active in speaking out against the women's suffrage movement, which he opposed on the grounds that God had given men dominion over women and that women's 'natural' place was in the home caring for their children. He wrote that "an enlarged unqualified suffrage... an aggravated misery [and a threatening danger". So influential were his views that suffragist Ellen Battelle Dietrick's last book, "Women in the Early Christian Ministry" (1897)—in which she offered a refutation of Christian teachings that relegated women to second-class status—was subtitled "A Reply to Bishop Doane, and Others".