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THE STRUGGLE FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE: EARLY TACTICS

The struggle for women’s civil and economic rights, including woman suffrage, was one of the major movements of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries in the United States. New Jersey women and men were in the forefront of this movement. After the Civil War, when it became clear that the proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the United State Constitution would not enfranchise women as it did African American men, woman suffrage advocates became alarmed. New Jersey women were among the first to take action. Though suffragists were criticized as extremists, they organized at the local, county and state levels, they spoke out publicly, they published tracts and broadsides, they petitioned governmental bodies, they worked for sympathetic political candidates, and they engaged in various types of public protest.

New Jersey Women’s Unique Position. New Jersey women rallied around the fact that they once were allowed to vote and had this right taken away. How had this come about? The first constitution of the state, the New Jersey Constitution of 1776, (Article IV) gave all inhabitants worth fifty pounds the right to vote, without reference to gender or race. New Jersey women were the only women in the nation with this right and some of them were known to have voted in several elections until their voting rights, and those of African Americans, were stripped from them. In 1807 the New Jersey Legislature passed "An Act to regulate the election of members of the legislative council and general assembly, sheriffs and coroners in this state". that did away with property requirements but limited the vote to white men. Later white male suffrage was written into the revised New Jersey Constitution of 1844 (Article II).

The Beginnings of the Suffrage Movement. In 1867 and 1868, the woman suffrage movement in the United States was in its infancy. The 37 states were recovering from Civil War and reformers were committed to expanding the civil rights of those who had been left out of the political process. Lucy Stone  of Orange, a nationally-known reformer and orator, took the lead in the struggle by speaking before the New Jersey legislature on March 6, 1867, advocating the vote for women and African Americans. That spring she traveled with her husband, Henry Blackwell, throughout Kansas to advocate the passage of a similar state referendum there. Later that year the suffrage movement in New Jersey was launched.

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