How Did the Vote Expand?

In 1790, New Jersey became the first state to explicitly enfranchise women by describing voters as “he or she” in a new election law.

The New Jersey Assembly adopted the new law on November 18, 1790. It increased access to the polls by adopting township instead of county polling, and improved voter privacy by establishing a ballot system. It also stated that a voter could only cast a ballot wherever “he or she” resided. 

The new law applied at first to only 7 of the 13 counties in the state, all in West Jersey. By including a feminine pronoun in their description of voters, the new law made clear what the 1776 Constitution had only implied — that women could vote in New Jersey. 

Electoral Reform Enrolled Law, New Jersey State Archives, Department of State

For women voters, a small omission in the 1797 voting law represented a big change. 

The new law retained the property qualification, but it excluded the term “clear estate,” which meant clear ownership of property. Its absence may explain the apparently dramatic rise in women voting after 1797.

Wives often had, as Abigail Adams put it, property “I call my own,” even if their legal ownership was unclear. Widows often had limits placed on their property by a husband’s will. Arguably, neither types of property were truly “clear estate.”

This 1797 law expanded the election reforms of the 1790 statute to include all 13 counties. By allowing possession of property without “clear estate,” it may have been a subtle but dramatic win for women voters.

Neither the 1790 or 1797 statutes included directions for confirming a voter’s possession of 50 pounds, other than the voter’s own word. In addition, the nation had started shifting currency from British pounds to American dollars. This made it difficult to accurately determine taxpayers’ property ownership. The lack of regulations added confusion to some elections.

Electoral Reform Enrolled Law, New Jersey State Archives, Department of State

The 1787 Federal Constitution left decisions about who could vote up to each state. In New Jersey, the experience of voting was not uniform or consistent. It was a source of contention and debate. 

Since New Jersey’s 1776 Constitution lacked an amendment clause, the electoral statutes of 1790 and 1797 attempted to clarify the constitution’s voting law without altering the document itself. This inspired critics to argue that the new laws had misinterpreted New Jersey’s Constitution by opening the vote to women and people of color. 

But defenders of the vote prevailed, at least at first. In 1800, a letter published in a newspaper by a New Jersey legislator argued, “townships of the state shall not refuse the vote of any widowed or unmarried woman of full age, nor any person of colour…provided each is worth fifty pounds…Our Constitution gives this right to maids and widows black or white.”

Problems with voting in New Jersey increased in 1798 when a new law allowed only white male taxpayers to vote for town officials (town clerk, collector, poll inspectors, and judges). Property owners, regardless of race or sex, still elected county, state, and federal officials. This law created an awkward conflict of interest problem at the polls. Poll inspectors (town officials) who oversaw county, state, and federal elections would have to turn away people who did not meet the property requirement, such as some taxpayers who elected the inspectors. In response, some poll inspectors stopped enforcing the property requirement. Curiously, the evidence from manuscript poll lists suggests that these poll inspectors also admitted more women to vote, even though women were barred from voting for these town officials. 

In some ways, the later 1807 statute on voting, which took the vote away from women and free people of color, aimed to resolve voting discrepancies by making the voter qualifications for county, state, and federal offices the same as town offices.

“Extract of a Letter from a Member of the Legislature of this State to the Editors,” Centinel of Freedom, Library of Congress, Serial and Government Publications Division, Washington, DC

The New Jersey Constitution’s inclusive electorate influenced and took inspiration from Revolutionary ideas in the states and across the Atlantic. A new kind of women’s “rights talk” emerged in the 1790s and, along with it, a new generation of women activists, intellectuals, educators, and politicians. These women — and men — pushed gender boundaries and advocated for equal rights for women in Europe and America, some even drawing from the example of women voters in New Jersey. 

An upsurge in women’s publishing in the post-Revolutionary era accompanied calls for women’s rights and inspired a dialogue between women activists, among them some of New Jersey’s most political women.

Were these men and women “feminists?”

A Lady Copying at a Drawing Table, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

In 2018, the Museum of the American Revolution discovered polling records that document – for the first time – that large numbers of women voted in New Jersey between 1776 and 1807.

Between 2018 and 2020, the Museum uncovered the names of 163 women voters on nine poll lists dating from 1800 to 1807. These lists have made it possible to research the stories of these women, the first women voters in the United States.

These lists document women’s political significance and participation in local, state, and federal elections in early New Jersey. This in-depth analysis of existing poll lists from early New Jersey challenges the idea that women in the Early Republic were only passive witnesses and bystanders of the political processes that shaped the new nation.