New Jersey Suffragists and the Path to Women’s Voting Rights
New Jersey suffragists greet fellow activists from San Francisco on their way to petition Congress in 1915. (Source: Library of Congress)
A century since the passage of the 19th amendment, we honor the suffragists whose conviction, protest, and tenacity helped to secure women’s voting rights in the United States. Several New Jersey women including Lucy Stone and Alice Paul emerged as leading figures in a movement that compelled the US Congress and state legislators to pass and ultimately ratify the 19th amendment in August 1920.
Adoption of the amendment required the approval of thirty-six states, and New Jersey’s ratification on February 9,1920, marked the 29th state to approve—with seven more states required. But at the state level, the 19th amendment would actually restore voting rights to women in New Jersey, who—under certain conditions—previously held voting rights.
Under the New Jersey constitution, adopted in 1776, “all inhabitants of this colony, of full age, who are worth fifty pounds … and have resided within the county … for twelve months,” could vote. So African-Americans and single women who met the residence and property thresholds could vote until 1807, when the right was limited to “free white males.”
By 1848, the summer Seneca Falls Convention sparked nationwide mobilization for women’s rights. Led by activists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the gathering drew some 300 supporters including abolitionist Frederick Douglass, around improved education, employment and voting rights for women.
In Orange, NJ, Lucy Stone challenged male state legislators to face the hypocrisy of taxation without representation when she refused to pay property taxes assessed to her farm house in 1857. A letter from Stone to the township collector, and published in the Orange Journal on January 18, 1858, read in part:
“Enclosed I return my tax bill, without paying it. My reason for doing so is that women suffer taxation and yet have no representation, which is not only unjust to one half of the adult population, but is contrary to our theory of government… we believe that when the attention of men is called to the wide difference between their theory of government and its practices in this particular, they cannot fail to see the mistake they now make by imposing taxes on women, while they refuse them the right of suffrage, and that the sense of justice which is in all good men, will lead them to correct it. Then shall we cheerfully pay our taxes—not till then.”
A decade later, in 1867, Stone founded the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association.
The nascent women’s suffrage movement had slowed during the Civil War, but rallied in 1869 with the founding of two national suffrage groups: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) led by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell. Both organizations used lobbying, petitioning, public speaking tours, and demonstrations as means to increase public awareness and support over subsequent decades. But while the NWSA considered a federal constitutional amendment to be the viable path to women’s voting rights, the AWSA viewed state by state campaigns as the more effective strategy. Passage of the 15th Amendment granting black men the right to vote had also divided the two groups, with AWSA’s Stone and Blackwell supporting the measure, and NWSA’s Anthony and Stanton opposing the amendment because it denied suffrage to women of all races. The two groups later merged to form the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1890.
By 1915, Rev. Florence Spearing Randolph, minister for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Summit, NJ, launched the New Jersey State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. The group worked to address social inequality throughout the state, and banded with the NJ Woman Suffrage Association in 1917. That year, Mount Laurel native, and National Woman’s Party founder, Alice Paul was one of a thousand “Silent Sentinels” who picketed the White House starting in January. Holding up signs that read, “Mr. President how long must women wait for liberty?” the women stood outside the White House gates in protest wearing sashes of purple white and gold—colors of the National Woman’s Party.
The silent demonstrations lasted for eighteen months and overlapped with the US engagement in World War I, at which time the women were increasingly harassed and arrested on police charges of traffic obstruction.
Portrait of Alice Paul (Source: Library of Congress)
On November 14, 1917, some thirty Sentinels were arrested, imprisoned and badly beaten at the instruction of prison authorities. Dubbed the “Night of Terror,” the incident garnered national headlines and public sympathy for Paul and the dozens of suffragists. Paul was sentenced to seven months, and started a hunger strike in response to the abuse. Two weeks later, the women were released from prison. The Sentinels made a strong case that women could no longer be denied their right to participate in the political process of voting.
President Woodrow Wilson changed his position, and in 1918, announced his support for women’s suffrage. In the following year, Congress approved the amendment, with votes in the House of Representatives on May 21, and the Senate on June 4. And on August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women’s suffrage was certified and officially became law.
For more information about exhibits and upcoming events commemorating the #WomensVote100 centennial, visit: