Suffrage was available to most women and African Americans in New Jersey immediately upon the formation of the state. The first New Jersey state constitution (of 1776) allowed any person who owned a certain value of property to become a voter. In 1790, the state constitution was changed to specify that voters were "he or she". Politicians seeking office deliberately courted women voters who often decided narrow elections favoring the Federalist Party.
Under the auspices of election reform, in 1807 a "progressive" law was passed which abolished the property requirement for voting, boosting the number of eligible voters, while explicitly barring women and black voters. The law allowed the Democratic-Republican party to win the state in the 1808 United States presidential election under the new direct electoral system. Like many women in other states, New Jersey women became involved in the abolition movement and several prominent abolitionists who later became suffragists lived in the state. One of the early suffrage protests took place when Lucy Stone refused to pay her property taxes in 1857 under the Revolutionary slogan of "no taxation without representation".
After the Civil War, some suffrage groups formed and women began to engage in protest voting. African American women formed separate groups to help push for suffrage in their communities. In the late 1880s, a rural school suffrage bill that affected communities with open meetings, was passed, allowing some women limited access to vote. A series of state court cases were filed on different accounts in regards to voting, further muddying the law. In the early 20th century, suffragists in New Jersey grew in numbers and became bolder. They staged meetings, held parades, and other types of publicity stunts to raise awareness for women's suffrage. Most of the different suffrage groups worked together in cooperatives and pushed for a women's suffrage amendment.
In 1915, they had the chance to campaign for a voter referendum on the amendment to the New Jersey state constitution. Despite the hard push, the amendment did not pass. Suffragists continued the fight in the state, with the notable addition of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), started by New Jersey's Alice Paul. The CU was later known as the National Woman's Party (NWP) and many New Jersey members acted as Silent Sentinels, protesting in Washington, D.C. They were pushing for a federal suffrage amendment which New Jersey ratified on February 10, 1920.
Early history
Some women enjoyed early suffrage in New Jersey. The state constitution specified that any woman or man who could meet the property requirement set by law could vote. This was a deliberate part of liberal sentiment in the state to allow many different groups of people the right to vote. New Jersey specifically set the property value low and included African Americans and other groups of people as eligible voters. Married women were not allowed to vote, but widows and unmarried women with property could. The inclusion of women voting early in New Jersey's history was a "radical" effort to extend "Revolutionary doctrine to its furthest—but logical—extreme." A refinement of the original wording specified that voters were considered "he or she," and this change took place in 1790.
In 1797, the law was extended to allow women to vote in six New Jersey counties that were not originally included in 1790 change. That year, on October 18, an early women's suffrage poem was published in the Newark Centinel of Freedom. The same paper printed a letter from a state legislator that said that it was intentionally written into the state constitution that all women of all races should have the right to vote. The role of women in the 1800 election of Thomas Jefferson was noticed by the New Jersey press. Alexander Hamilton and Senator Matthias Ogden included women during their campaigning in parts of New Jersey. Many politicians of the time included get out the vote campaigns that also targeted women.
Allowing women to vote remained controversial because some people worried that Revolutionary thought and ideas could go too far. In response to Abigail Adams writing in approval of women voters, her husband, John Adams, wondered "how far Revolutionary principles should be extended." One lawmaker wrote disapprovingly in a newspaper, "Our constitution gives the right to maids and widows, white and black."
Women voters became convenient scapegoats to blame for candidate's losses. Women were sometimes called "petticoat electors" and were considered to be easy to manipulate and generally incompetent. The Federalists also believed that denying women the right to vote would help them politically against the Republicans in New Jersey. Newspapers started reporting that women often decided elections with slim margins. In 1802, it was claimed by the loser of an election that he lost because a "married woman and an enslaved woman had illegally cast ballots."
By studying poll lists, it is estimated that between 1797 and 1807 women made up 7.7% of total recorded votes and in some areas, up to 14%. The True American wrote that women may have made up 25% of the vote in 1802.
Women of the time expressed their political ideas in newspapers, some writing under the names "Mary Meanwell," "Miss Bannerman," and a "Quaker Woman." As women began to vote in greater numbers after 1797, there were more challenges to the right of women to vote. In 1807, there was a tight election that was "hotly contested" because of fraudulent activity where some voters may have voted more than once, with some men even going so far as to dress as women to perpetrate the fraud. The men who dressed as women to vote fraudulently were not prosecuted for breaking the law. By this time, women voting were seen as a "political liability rather than a political asset."
The first attempt to take away women's and African-Americans' right to vote was written up in 1802 as "An Act Relating to Female Suffrage" by William Pennington. After some debate, Pennington's act was withdrawn. In 1807, John Condit, who had only won his position by a narrow margin, introduced another act to overturn the right of women and black people to vote in New Jersey. African Americans in Lawnside and Gouldtown continued to agitate against this change, not only immediately after passage, but also in the decades following. Because the statute removed the need for men to prove a property requirement before voting it was "billed as progressive reform." Under the auspices of "election reform" and "anti-corruption," women and black people lost the right to vote. There were no challenges to the law by women or African-Americans before the New Jersey constitution was revised. Some white women may have supported the loss of the vote for themselves because it also meant that African-Americans and immigrants could not vote, either. Later, in the 1910s, suffragists argued that stripping the rights of women and black people was done by a "corrupt legislature."
Continued efforts During the 1830s, many New Jersey women became involved in the abolition movement. Sarah and Angelina Grimké moved with Angelina's husband, Theodore Dwight Weld, to New Jersey in the late 1830s. They met Elizabeth Cady Stanton when she and her husband, Henry Brewster Stanton came to visit. Cady Stanton learned a lot about ongoing reform efforts during this visit.
In 1844, New Jersey wrote a new Constitution which explicitly denied women and African Americans the right to vote. On June 18, 1844, an attempt to include women's suffrage was asked by John C. Ten Eyck, who had a petition from Burlington. The petition was read and not acted on.
By 1847, feminist discussions on married women's property rights were taking place in New Jersey. By 1851, married women were able to receive life insurance benefits. The next year, a limited act to let married women have control over property was passed.
During the Pennsylvania Women's Convention at West Chester in 1852, many New Jersey suffragists attended. John Pierpont spoke about the early rights of New Jersey women to vote during the Women's Rights Convention in Rochester in 1853. A petition for changing the laws of the state to declare that women and men were equal under the law was given to the state legislature by Henry Lafetra, a Monmouth Assemblyman in 1854. The response from the legislature was that women "should accept their subservient role." A few years later in 1857, Harriet Lafetra started another petition from Monmouth County for women's rights and the right to vote, which met with a similar response. In the spring of the same year, Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell moved to Orange. Stone refused to pay her property taxes that year in November on the grounds that it was "taxation without representation." Because Stone didn't pay her taxes, some of her personal possessions were sold at auction on 1858.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, women's suffrage activities largely ceased in the state.
After the Civil War
In December 1866, Stone and Blackwell encouraged the formation of the Vineland Equal Suffrage Association, which supported both women's and African-American suffrage. The next year, in November, the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association (NJWSA) was formed in Vineland with Lucy Stone as a leader. Vineland was very much a hotbed of political activity at the time. In early 1867, Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell created a petition to send to the New Jersey legislature to remove the words "white male" from the voting qualifications in the state constitution. Stone also testified in front of a legislative committee on universal suffrage for both black people and women. Her speech was published and shared throughout the state.
On March 10, 1868, inspired by Stone, Portia Gage attempted to vote. The next November, on the third, 172 women in Vineland, including four black women, attempted to vote. The Vineland ballot box for women was created by teacher and farmer, Susan Pecker Fowler, who made it from blueberry cartons and green fabric. The point of the exercise was to publicize the idea that women did want to vote. Lucy Stone and her mother-in-law also attempted the same thing in Newark. Fowler also wrote the first of around 40 annual letters to the editor in protest of women's disenfranchisement.
After Stone moved to Boston in 1869 the suffrage group she started dissolved. During the 1870s, women in New Jersey participated in further protest votes. In 1872, National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) encouraged women to vote to "test the word 'citizen' in the Fourteenth Amendment." Elizabeth Cady Stanton also attempted to vote on November 2, 1880, in Tenafly.
As New Jersey worked to change the state constitution in the 1870s, suffragists petitioned the constitutional convention planning committee to remove the requirement that voters be male. In 1875, the state Constitution was amended to only remove the word "white" from the list of requirements to be a voter. Phebe Hanaford, a Universalist preacher in the state, complained that "At the present time the Constitution of our State is in strict accordance with the statement, viz, that all persons may become voters except lunatics, criminals, idiots, and women."
In the early 1880s, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) grew in New Jersey, especially among African-American women who formed separate groups and committees. Therese Walling Seabrook worked with the WCTU of New Jersey and helped push it towards affirming women's suffrage. Seabrook worked on the New Jersey WCTU's legislative committee and learned effective strategies for conducting petition drives and lobbying the legislature. In 1884, Seabrook and suffragists Henry Blackwell and Phebe Hanaford began to work together and were able to get some support for women's suffrage from state legislators.