New Jersey briefly extended suffrage to propertied unmarried women in 1776

Evidence

As in New Hampshire and Virginia, New Jersey reformed its old governing structure along republican lines by having voters elect members of both houses of the legislature. Those members would choose the governor. To enhance popular rule, the New Jersey Constitution barred legislators from serving more than three years in any six-year period. Further, while the other new constitutions continued to restrict voting to free adult males and retained colonial-era property-ownership or tax-payment requirements, New Jersey extended suffrage to “all inhabitants of this Colony, of full age” who owned fifty pounds worth of property, which included unmarried women with sufficient wealth. At the time, this mainly meant widows. No colony ever allowed married women to own property, and no state would do so until the mid-1800s, but widows often inherited property from their husbands. It remains unclear how many women voted under this provision until the 1790s, when new state laws confirmed that “inhabitants” in fact meant men and women. The ratio of women voting in some towns reached up to a quarter of the total until New Jersey ended the practice in 1807. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 269

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to course themes on who counted as a rights-bearing legal subject at the founding; also resonates with the reader’s interest in competing definitions of equality and freedom among founders.
• ADDENDUM: Provides a concrete counter-example to assumptions in ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ and other pieces about women’s status; a startling early instance of female suffrage during the very founding era.
• SEED: Angles for an essay or course paper: the 1776 New Jersey woman suffrage provision as evidence that ‘the founders’ were not monolithic on gender, and the interpretive fight over the word ‘inhabitants’.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did any women actually exercise the vote and what arguments preceded the 1807 revocation?