Women's Right to Vote

A Blurb & Video on Women’s Suffrage

I wrote a response to a friend about Women’s suffrage that was largely based on the book by Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America. I wanted to post it as well as a video I found while rooting around Technorati following links to my blog. I found this very interesting video on Matthew K. Tabor’s (props) site and I wanted to share it with my viewers – as meager as they are. Take note that while full rights came in 1920, some states did have women being able to vote prior to the Amendment… which is key.

A few examples of “women’s suffrage” in America.

New Jersey’s 1790 revision of its voting law dutifully implemented the Constitution’s literal “all inhabitants” by referring to voters as “he or she.” A 1796 law governing voting in federal elections, used the same language: “No person shall be entitled to vote in any township or precinct, than that in which he or she doth both reside…. Every voter shall openly, and in full view, deliver his or her ballot….” Neither of these laws aroused any particular opposition or controversy.

Let us pause and reflect on what was just put down on the dinner table in front of us. For the first time in history, the women of a political community shared with men the right, stated in public law, to select their rulers. There can be only one explanation of why it happened in the United States at this particular time, and in no other country at any previous time. Most Americans, including the members of the New Jersey legislature, believed in the fundamental principle of the Revolution, that all men [i.e. humankind] are created equal. No other government had ever been grounded on this idea. Women, in fact, voted in the year of the Constitutional Convention. Historian Richard McCormick writes, “A Burlington poll list of 1787 contained the names Iona Curtis and Selveria Lilvey, presumably women.”

The first newspaper discussion of female voting in New Jersey did not occur until 1797, when the Federalist candidate in a hotly contested election to the state legislature was supported (unsuccessfully) by the women of Elizabethtown. In the Adams – Jefferson presidential election of 1800, and in other subsequent elections, women voted in large numbers throughout the state.

The land owning law requirements in some states were so loosely followed that almost all could vote (as we shall see). Still concentrating on Jersey and their Assembly of 1800 which considered a law that would have stated, “the inspectors of elections shall not refuse the vote of any widow or unmarried women of full age [holding no land in other words].” One representative wrote: “The House unanimously agreed that this section would be clearly within the meaning of the [New Jersey] Constitution, and as the Constitution is the guide of inspectors, it would be entirely useless to insert it into law. The motion was negatived. Our Constitution gives this right to maids or widows, black or white.” It was later said that the votes of two or three women of color swung the election of a state legislator in 1802.

A close electoral battle between Newark and Elizabeth over location of a new courthouse inspired massive voting fraud on both sides. Women (and of course men) were in the thick of it. “Women and girls, black and white, married and single, with and without qualifications, voted again and again.” This is the episode which became the excuse for an 1807 law that restricted the franchise to free white males. This law directly violated the New Jersey’s constitution, which the courts thereafter dishonestly refused to acknowledge. Ironically, the representative who promoted the new law was the one and only Jeffersonian Republican who had nearly been defeated in 1797 by the federalist women of Elizabeth. This legislator, and the courts, threw out God’s law [created equal] and implemented man’s law.

Women also voted in other states during the founding era as well. Robert Dinkin, a historian of early American voting documents women in Massachusetts towns voting. A New York newspaper reported that “two old widows, tendered, and were admitted to vote.” That was in 1737. Records are sparse, so it is likely that other incidents of female voting occurred in these and other states, both before the Revolution and after. By the time the “amendment” was made to allow all sexes and races to vote, almost all were… without changing or adding a single word to the constitution. Even Wyoming granted the right to vote to women in 1869, again, without an amendment.