New Jersey’s Early Experiment with Women’s Suffrage
In 1776, Article IV of the
New Jersey Constitution said “all inhabitants of the Colony of full Age, who are worth Fifty Pounds . . . shall be entitled to vote Representatives in Council and Assembly.” It was not uncommon for state constitutions at the time to lack, as New Jersey’s did, an explicit gender requirement to vote. Delaware’s constitution, for example, merely stated “the right of suffrage . . . shall remain as exercised by law at present.” Still, the insinuation that one had to be a male to vote in Delaware and elsewhere was often heavily implied from the strong presence of gendered language — “he” — throughout the document. But in New Jersey, the lack of an explicit limitation of voting rights to males left its constitution open to further clarification, Professor Richard P. McCormick
wrote.
In 1790, further clarification was provided when the New Jersey legislature took the unusual step of passing an “electoral reform” bill that included the pronouns “he or she.” The bill only applied to 7 of the state’s 13 counties, but was groundbreaking nonetheless.
Although the passage of this law was
initially attributed to Quaker lawmakers in those areas and their uniquely egalitarian social views, further research raised additional theories, including that
political motives may have strongly influenced lawmakers’ considerations — they were trying to ensure their candidates would gather enough votes to win. The reality of the motivation for the bill may live somewhere between the progressive suffragist beliefs and political calculation, but some at least hoped the public was becoming more accepting of the idea of women’s participation.
“The rights of women are no longer strange sounds to an American ear, and I devoutly hope the day is not far distant when we shall find them dignifying in a distinguishing code the jurisprudence of several states of the Union,” a speaker
told a New Jersey crowd at a Federalist rally on July 4, 1793.
No matter the incentive, the law created a novel opportunity for women of the fledgling nation: the right to vote. Between 1790 and 1797, they did so in relatively small numbers. When a new election law extended the vote to land-owning women statewide in 1797, the proportion of women voting increased. In 1802, a Trenton, New Jersey newspaper reported women voting at “
alarming heights” — about 25 percent of total turnout.
Unfortunately, women’s access to the polls was short lived. Women voters and suffragists alike weathered criticism from people who frequently blamed “
easily manipulated” women voters for various election results. A local referendum in 1807 to determine a county seat included claims that people dressed up as women in order to vote twice.
Later that year, the New Jersey legislature attempted to
remedy the problem of “voter fraud” by restricting eligibility to cast a ballot to white men. By 1844, when the New Jersey Constitution was redrafted at a constitutional convention, lawmakers further enshrined the lack of women’s suffrage,
limiting the vote to “white male citizens” 21 years and older. Women’s right to vote in the state wasn’t again acknowledged until the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which provided that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
