New Jersey’s Constitution Allowed Women to Vote in the 1700s

The 19th Amendment — ratified 105 years ago today — is the most celebrated marker of women’s right to vote. But many territories and states recognized women’s voting rights decades before. The territory of Wyoming, for example, enacted its women’s suffrage law in 1869, and the right was part of Wyoming’s constitution when it became a state in 1890.

But women voting in America actually precedes even the early days of the suffrage movement, before the 1848 Seneca Falls convention that introduced a Declaration of Sentiments demanding women receive “the rights and privileges” belonging to them as U.S. citizens, including the right to vote. In fact, the state constitutional language that allowed women to vote existed even at the birth of the nation.

New Jersey’s Early Experiment with Women’s Suffrage

In 1776, Article IV of the New Jersey Constitution said “all inhabitants of the Colony of full Age, who are worth Fifty Pounds . . . shall be entitled to vote Representatives in Council and Assembly.” It was not uncommon for state constitutions at the time to lack, as New Jersey’s did, an explicit gender requirement to vote. Delaware’s constitution, for example, merely stated “the right of suffrage . . . shall remain as exercised by law at present.” Still, the insinuation that one had to be a male to vote in Delaware and elsewhere was often heavily implied from the strong presence of gendered language — “he” — throughout the document. But in New Jersey, the lack of an explicit limitation of voting rights to males left its constitution open to further clarification, Professor Richard P. McCormick wrote.

In 1790, further clarification was provided when the New Jersey legislature took the unusual step of passing an “electoral reform” bill that included the pronouns “he or she.” The bill only applied to 7 of the state’s 13 counties, but was groundbreaking nonetheless.

Although the passage of this law was initially attributed to Quaker lawmakers in those areas and their uniquely egalitarian social views, further research raised additional theories, including that political motives may have strongly influenced lawmakers’ considerations — they were trying to ensure their candidates would gather enough votes to win. The reality of the motivation for the bill may live somewhere between the progressive suffragist beliefs and political calculation, but some at least hoped the public was becoming more accepting of the idea of women’s participation.

“The rights of women are no longer strange sounds to an American ear, and I devoutly hope the day is not far distant when we shall find them dignifying in a distinguishing code the jurisprudence of several states of the Union,” a speaker told a New Jersey crowd at a Federalist rally on July 4, 1793.

No matter the incentive, the law created a novel opportunity for women of the fledgling nation: the right to vote. Between 1790 and 1797, they did so in relatively small numbers. When a new election law extended the vote to land-owning women statewide in 1797, the proportion of women voting increased. In 1802, a Trenton, New Jersey newspaper reported women voting at “alarming heights” — about 25 percent of total turnout.

Unfortunately, women’s access to the polls was short lived. Women voters and suffragists alike weathered criticism from people who frequently blamed “easily manipulated” women voters for various election results. A local referendum in 1807 to determine a county seat included claims that people dressed up as women in order to vote twice.

Later that year, the New Jersey legislature attempted to remedy the problem of “voter fraud” by restricting eligibility to cast a ballot to white men. By 1844, when the New Jersey Constitution was redrafted at a constitutional convention, lawmakers further enshrined the lack of women’s suffrage, limiting the vote to “white male citizens” 21 years and older. Women’s right to vote in the state wasn’t again acknowledged until the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which provided that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

Modern State Constitutional Voting Protections

Today, state constitutions go further than their federal counterpart toward protecting the right to vote, and not just for women. Forty-nine of 50 state constitutions — all but Arizona’s — recognize citizens’ right to vote in affirmative terms. More than half the state constitutions use language requiring elections to be free, equal, and fair. Oklahoma’s constitution, for example, provides that “all citizens of the United States, over the age of eighteen (18) years, who are bona fide residents of this state, are qualified electors of this state” and that all elections “shall be free and equal.” The federal Constitution contains no such guarantees.

State courts have relied on sweeping protections like these to strike down laws that restrict the right to vote. Ahead of the 2024 election, for example, the Montana Supreme Court held that laws limiting the use of student identification as required voter ID and eliminating Election Day registration violated the state constitution.

“Free and equal” language has also been interpreted as prohibiting partisan gerrymandering. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the high court struck down the state’s 2011 congressional map, stating that “an election corrupted by extensive, sophisticated gerrymandering and partisan dilution of votes is not ‘free and equal.’” New Mexico’s supreme court, meanwhile, held that the state’s Equal Protection Clause barred partisan gerrymandering that is “egregious in intent and effect.” Other states, like Arizona, Michigan, and Virginia, have amended their constitutions to prevent gerrymandering by diminishing the state legislature’s role in drawing district lines.

Voting issues encompassed by constitutional amendments continue to be broad and varied. In the November 2024 election alone, citizens considered whether to amend their state constitutions on voting issues including primary election procedures, ranked choice voting, voter ID, and absentee voting rules.

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From the country’s earliest days, state constitutions played a major role in defining who can vote, and how. Nearly 250 years later, that remains the case.

Joshua Drasin was previously an intern at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Erin Geiger Smith is a writer and editor at the Brennan Center and the author of Thank You for Voting and its companion young readers’ edition.

Suggested Citation: Joshua Drasin & Erin Geiger Smith, New Jersey’s Constitution Allowed Women to Vote in the 1700s, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (Aug. 18, 2025), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-jerseys-constitution-allowed-women-vote-1700s