Despite the hopes of women like Judith Sargent Murray (The Sentiments of an American Woman) and Abigail Adams, most of the men drafting constitutions for the newly independent states during the American Revolution did not, in fact, “remember the ladies.” Only New Jersey’s 1776 constitution left open the possibility that women might be voting citizens, since it used the comparatively open terminology “all free inhabitants” (and not “men,” “freemen, “or the like) to describe those qualified to vote in state elections. Over the next thirty years, single women who met the property qualification (£50) and were over the age of twenty-one regularly participated in local and state politics. Although scholars have sometimes treated this encompassing language as an unintended consequence of the hasty composition of the 1776 constitution, two separate acts of legislation (November 18, 1790, and February 1797) described voters using the phrase “he or she.” Indeed, New Jersey’s legislators had multiple opportunities to clarify or constrict the meaning of the bill, yet for thirty years refused to do so, allowing women to vote. The state’s experiment with female suffrage came to an end only after the intensely partisan election of 1800, in which women were accused of illegitimately influencing the outcome. As a result, in 1807, as part of a larger political compromise, the state legislature passed an act restricting suffrage to white men. New Jersey’s women would not vote again for more than one hundred years.

New Jersey’s experiment with female suffrage was noted and remarked upon by both proponents and detractors of the idea: in Minor v. Happersett the U.S. States Supreme Court referred to the singularity of New Jersey’s constitutional provisions for female suffrage as evidence that while citizenship rights might include suffrage, they did not necessarily do so in the case of women.