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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.

In November 1807, the New Jersey State Legislature stripped the vote from women, people of color, and recent immigrants. They redefined the property qualification to include all white male taxpayers. The preamble of the new act on election regulations justified the change by citing “doubts” that “have been raised, and great diversities in practices obtained throughout the state in regard to the admission of aliens, persons of color, or negroes, to vote in elections” as well as “the mode of ascertaining” voter qualifications. What did this mean? What had happened?

By exercising the right to vote, early New Jersey women influenced the woman suffrage movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. These later suffragists used the memory of the Revolution and the nation’s first women voters to ground their position in America’s founding and assert their right to equal citizenship.  The story of early New Jersey’s women voters reminds us that progress is not necessarily linear and unending, but that rights and liberties require constant vigilance to preserve and protect. The suffragists of the 19th and 20th centuries fought to regain a right that had been taken from New Jersey women in 1807. This later activism vindicated the first generation of women voters and became part of these women voters’ legacy.