How Did Women Lose the Vote?

The 1790s saw the emergence of America’s first national political parties, the Democratic Republicans and the Federalists. Parties were not yet accepted as having a legitimate role in American politics, and many feared that partisan rivalries would destroy the new nation. Partisan distrust, editorial wars in newspapers, and accusations of voter fraud got a jump start from the controversies surrounding the 1800 presidential election in which Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson narrowly defeated Federalist incumbent John Adams. Though Jefferson had won at the national level, New Jersey had voted Federalist. 

New Jersey supported Adams in 1800, but over the next three years the Democratic Republicans began to dominate elections. The change began in 1797, the same year that township voting laws and the elimination of “clear estate” as part of the property requirement expanded the electorate. The combination of rising partisan rancor and the increasingly inclusive elections sparked accusations of fraud and charges of campaigning among those unqualified to vote, or manipulating groups assumed to be poorly informed.

Over the next decade, members of both parties sought votes from women, people of color, “aliens” and people who did not meet the property requirement. A growing partisan press implied that these appeals gave some politicians inappropriate influence, and even that it encouraged corruption and fraud. 

Both sides deployed prejudiced ideas that women and people of color were easily manipulated or controlled to cast the other party as illegitimate. One editorial, for example, suggested that women’s votes gave the handsome Federalist Alexander Hamilton an unfair advantage over his opponents, while another asserted a Jeffersonian-Republican candidate for governor effectively voted multiple times by bringing all the women in his household eligible to vote to the polling place. 

In this way, the partisan political system fueled suspicion and hostility toward New Jersey’s relatively inclusive democratic experiment.

(Left) John Adams, National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mrs. Robert Homans

(Right) Thomas Jefferson, White House Collection/White House Historical Association

Accusations of both voter fraud and voter suppression grew after the Revolutionary War. But were these accusations legitimate? Why was the solution to take the vote away from women, people of color, and recent immigrants?

Between 1783 and 1808, The New Jersey Legislature received 73 petitions to investigate these accusations (36 charging fraud and 37 charging suppression). 

Most petitions citing voter suppression were submitted to the legislature before the implementation of township voting in 1797, which vastly expanded the number and local control of polling places. Petitioners charged that voters, particularly in rural townships, did not have proper access to polling places or elections. They requested an alteration to the election law that ensured all townships had fair voting procedures and regulated and accessible election times and locations.

Petitioners claiming voter fraud sometimes claimed that male voters were disguising themselves in wigs and women’s clothing to vote multiple times. But most blamed disputed elections on judges and poll inspectors, who they claimed worked on behalf of a particular candidate or party, or had allowed married women, enslaved people, or recent immigrants to vote illegally. Some editorialists charged that poorly written laws provided poll inspectors with little help in verifying a person’s right to vote — that it was too difficult for inspectors to determine if a woman was married or single or if a Black person was enslaved or free. 

Poll inspectors also had their own conflicts of interest. They were locally elected at town meetings by a vote of all male taxpayers. Some of these voters could not legally vote for county, state, or federal officers. Poll inspectors had a difficult time turning them away without compromising their own election. 

The 1807 law claimed to simply seek a “uniform practice” and to “avoid all questions in regard to the qualification of the voter as to estate.” But by making all white male taxpayers eligible and excluding everyone else, it effectively scapegoated women, people of color, and “aliens” for all the state’s voting irregularities.

“Women Voting in New Jersey Toward the Close of the Last Century from an Old Illustration”, Image from the collections of and digitized by the University of Minnesota Libraries.

New Jersey became the last northern state to pass a gradual abolition law and abolish slavery with passage of the Act for the Gradual Emancipation of Slavery in 1804. 

While West Jersey Quakers backed gradual emancipation, East Jersey slaveholders in the state discredited the Act, arguing it was part of a Quaker plot to maintain control of the state legislature and give more Blacks the vote. 

But on the ground, antislavery sentiment gained traction across New Jersey in the 1790s with the help of efforts by the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. By the election of first Democratic-Republican Governor and antislavery advocate Joseph Bloomfield in 1803, the legislative majority in the state, composed of both Republicans and Federalists, embraced a plan for gradual abolition. 

While New Jersey passed gradual emancipation, it did little to improve the free Black population’s economic and social conditions, including limiting the franchise to white, property-owning men in 1807.

The fight to achieve a gradual abolition act further weakened the regionally divided Democratic-Republican Party to such a great extent that the party began to encourage actual voter fraud to maintain its control over the state. After one particularly overt case over the location of a courthouse in 1807, the legislature decided to answer the decade of calls for a revision to the New Jersey Constitution by stripping the vote from women and people of color that same year.

Anne-Marguérite-Joséphine-Henriette Rouillé de Marigny, Baroness Hyde de Neuville, Martha Church, Cook in “Ordinary” Costume; verso: study of a child, ca.1808-1810, watercolor, graphite, black chalk, brown and black ink, and touches of white gouache on paper; graphite. Purchase, New-York Historical Society, 1953.276. Photography © New-York Historical Society, http://www.nyhistory.org.

Women’s loss of the vote in New Jersey was the consequence of a larger “backlash” against women’s political gains that occurred in the Early Republic.

As women became increasingly politicized, both with the new “rights language” and by their growing recruitment as voters by political candidates, some began to see them as a threat to male authority, social and political stability, the gender status quo, and possibly the legitimacy of the new American experiment. 

Some believed women’s rights advocates, “female politicians,” and women voters in New Jersey reached a point of influence that, unlike their service in the Revolutionary War, was no longer for the good of the nation. Rather, these women were seen to pose a fundamental threat to the political order.

Election Day in Philadelphia (Detail), Museum purchase with funds provided by Henry Francis du Pont, 1959,0131 A, Courtesy Winterthur Museum

France, Haiti, and Ireland experienced Revolutions in the 1790s. And like the American Revolution, each of those Revolutions inspired and emboldened women to participate politically in unprecedented ways. But many Americans, particularly Federalists, did not portray these women — for instance the Citoyenne of the French Revolution — as accomplished or Revolutionary. Rather, they labeled these women as counterrevolutionaries and denounced them as unnatural women. 

Stoked by fears of foreign influence, partly influenced by political refugees from these other Revolutions living in America, Federalist President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law in 1798. These acts, passed in four parts, gave the President the power to imprison or deport “dangerous aliens,” and raised the citizenship requirement in the nation from 5 to 14 years, making it more difficult for foreigners to vote in the new nation. The Acts reflect the nation’s attempt to regulate immigrants and their rights, which had a direct impact on changing election laws in New Jersey. 

The laws became widely unpopular and helped John Adams’s Democratic Republican opponents achieve electoral victories in state government after 1800. The effect of the controversies over these laws in eroding women’s political rights lasted much longer.

Property protected--à la Françoise, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C, Reproduction Number LC-DIG-ppmsca-31156

In 1807, politicians charged that the state’s inclusive voter laws encouraged illegal voting by unpropertied women and enslaved people. By unanimous vote, the state legislature adopted a new law stripping the vote from all women, “persons of color," and immigrants, but expanded the vote to include all white male taxpayers.

What do you think was the most important factor in prompting this backlash against New Jersey’s early experiment? Was this change in New Jersey inevitable, or could they have kept their democratic experiment going and continued expanding it?

Next, we look at how that experiment changed again in the following decades and generations.

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