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On July 4, 1776, The American Continental Congress in Philadelphia adopted the Declaration of Independence, announcing that “all men are created equal.” Two days earlier in nearby Burlington, New Jersey, the new state legislature adopted a written constitution that would open the door to a radical new vision of voting in America, one that would include women and people of color among the voters. But what was the world like for the women and other people of New Jersey who might have read that constitution in 1776? What might it have meant to them? Did it really mean equality for men and women and for people of both European and African descent?

New Jersey became the first and only state to legally enfranchise women in 1790, when state legislatures reformed the New Jersey State Constitution’s election law to include the words “he or she.” It proclaimed what the New Jersey Constitution of 1776 had only implied: that propertied women could vote. This statute was neither accidental nor insignificant, and it changed the voting landscape in the state. Women voting was just one part of a growing national and international movement among some women to increase women’s rights, a movement inspired by Revolutionary-era ideology in both America and Europe. And while New Jersey blazed the trail in the new nation, it expressed a tide rising in other states as well, like Massachusetts, where Abigail Adams endorsed women voting in New Jersey.