A Short History of Women's Suffrage in the U.S.

This article was written by Nancy Prager-Kamel, the Chairwoman of the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States.

It is widely recognized that women in the United States secured—through long and determined struggle—the universal right to vote. That victory was ultimately enshrined in the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which Congress passed in 1919 and the states ratified in 1920. The fight for national suffrage lasted for over 70 years, beginning with the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. The amendment prohibits the denial of voting rights based on gender. However, poll taxes and literacy tests erected barriers which continued to disenfranchise many women, particularly African Americans, for decades.  

But in early America, each state set its own voting laws, with a changeable patchwork of requirements for residency, race, gender, marital status, property ownership, religion, and more. It will surely surprise you to know that in the state of New Jersey, women were legally granted this mandate in 1797. Due to a legal loophole, New Jersey women exercised the right to vote a century before countrywide suffrage. The “petticoat band” showed up to vote for the New Jersey state legislature, but only on a technicality. Their audacious actions created an impact which sent lawmakers into a scramble to shut them out.

Between 1776 and 1789, for instance, only three states—Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia—required voters to be white. Four—Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, and Rhode Island—did not specify gender. In 1789 they were joined by a fifth, Georgia. However, it appears that these constitutions didn’t specify gender because the writers simply assumed that all voters would be male. As far as we know, women did not vote in these states. Then in 1790, New Jersey made a small but radical change to the pronouns in its constitution. It said, “no person shall be entitled to vote in any other township or precinct, than that in which he or she doth actually reside at the time of the election.” The state intentionally, and explicitly, recognized women as voters.

However, in 1797 a modest revision to New Jersey’s property requirements unexpectedly expanded voting eligibility. By removing the phrase “clear estate,” which had previously limited voting to those with undisputed sole ownership of property, the law opened the door for many wives and widows to qualify. For a brief period, women in New Jersey were able to go to the polls and participate in local, state, and even federal elections.

The following year, after women attempted—unsuccessfully—to block a Republican candidate, newspapers mocked them in satirical verse. One poem jeered: “Although reinforced by the petticoat band, / True republican valor they could not withstand; / And of their disasters in triumph we’ll sing, / For the petticoat faction is a dangerous thing.”

In 1807 New Jersey revised its constitution, limiting the vote to white male taxpayers. Women no longer had the opportunity to vote in any state. Thus began a long struggle to regain this lost right. 

As in the early stages of the Republic, as politics grew more contentious, the leaders attempted to control the voting public to its advantage. This long struggle towards gender equality in the category of voting rights took 112 years to be finally and constitutionally enshrined.