Women's Suffrage: New Jersey's Lost 1776 Vote to the Night of Terror

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Under its 1776 laws, New Jersey let property owning women vote, and they did for more than 30 years until the legislature used a corrupt Essex County election in 1807 as a pretext to restrict the ballot to taxpaying white men. The episode traces how women won it back, starting with coverture, the common law doctrine that suspended a married woman's legal identity. Married women's property laws passed after the Panic of 1837, pushed by wealthy fathers protecting their daughters' inheritances, gave women the legal footing to rent halls and sign contracts. The Grimke sisters were condemned in a pastoral letter for speaking to mixed audiences, and at Seneca Falls in 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton's resolution for the vote passed only after Frederick Douglass rose to defend it.

Stanton partnered with Susan B. Anthony in 1851, and after the Civil War Francis and Virginia Minor argued that the 14th Amendment already made voting a right of citizenship. Anthony voted in Rochester in 1872, was arrested and convicted, and in 1875 Minor v. Happersett ruled that citizenship did not confer the vote. Senator Aaron Sargent introduced the amendment in 1878, but it sat for decades. In the 1910s Carrie Chapman Catt rebuilt NAWSA as a lobbying machine while Alice Paul founded the National Woman's Party in 1916, and the amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, with the text unchanged from Sargent's.

• Stanton's own husband refused to attend Seneca Falls, and the vote resolution was the only one that did not pass unanimously.
• At Anthony's trial she was barred from testifying, and the judge directed the all male jury to find her guilty.
• More than 200 Silent Sentinels picketed the White House during World War I, quoting Woodrow Wilson's words about democracy.
• At the Occoquan workhouse, guards beat and chained the suffragists in what became known as the Night of Terror, and hunger strikers were force fed.
• The six volume History of Woman Suffrage largely wrote out rivals such as Lucy Stone, who refused to take part.