A legal loophole allowed New Jersey women to vote a century before suffrage
In 1797 the “petticoat band” showed up to vote for the New Jersey state legislature, but only on a technicality. Their impact sent lawmakers into a scramble to shut them out.
On this day, newspapers reported the results of what may have been considered an ordinary New Jersey election, except for one thing: Women cast their votes alongside men.
“In Essex County,” wrote the New London Bee, “three candidates for the state legislature were carried against a violent opposition from both sexes. In Elizabethtown, the federal ladies, maids as well as matrons, believers in the democratic [Mary] Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, turned out in support of their favorite candidates, and gave in their votes to the number of 75 heads.”
(The 19th Amendment was a key step for women's rights in the U.S.)
Yes, women could legally vote—only in some places and for a period of time—long before the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. constitution. So too could people of color—in some places, at some times—well before the Fifteenth Amendment was passed in 1870. 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. If you were a wealthy white male Protestant citizen, you were pretty much guaranteed a vote anywhere. But the rules for others remained in flux.
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.
(After winning the vote, here’s why the suffragist movement took divergent paths)
By nature equal
Troubling technicalities
One barrier remained. Almost all states in the 18th century required voters to be property owners or taxpayers. This disenfranchised almost all women even in states that did not block them from voting, because at that time, most married women could not own property. Almost anything they brought to a marriage thereafter belonged to their husbands.
(For Black women, the 19th Amendment didn’t end their fight to vote)
In 1797, a slight revision to New Jersey’s wording about property rights opened those doors: Property owners no longer needed “clear estate,” or clear ownership, of their property, a requirement that had previously blocked many wives and widows. That year, women in New Jersey went to the polls (the exact number is hard to determine), including in the assembly elections. The following year, women came out again to try (unsuccessfully) to block a Republican candidate. Newspapers lampooned them in verse: “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’s a dangerous thing.”
As politics grew more charged in the early Republic, leaders tried to shape the voting public to their advantage, a practice that continues today. In 1807, New Jersey revised its constitution to limit the vote to white male taxpayers. On that day, women no longer voted anywhere in the United States. They faced a long struggle to regain that right, a struggle that would finally be won nationwide in the 20th century.
