Event · Significance tier 3 · provisional assessment
New Jersey election law names women as voters
New Jersey's statewide election law repeatedly described a voter as “he or she,” confirming that property-qualified women as well as men could cast ballots under the state's 1776 constitution.
- Category
- popular mobilization
- Episode relations
- 1
- Selection basis
- thematically required
Episode coverage
Episode 6
not covered · spoken: caption verified
Visual check: not checked
The Episode 6 spoken captions were searched for New Jersey women voters and the statute's pronouns. The episode does not include this electoral experiment; images remain unchecked.
Why it matters
The law and women's actual voting make the early republic's electorate contingent rather than naturally male, while property, coverture, race, and later partisan restriction bounded that participation.
Why this provisional tier
This tier predates canonical assessment v1. It remains a research hypothesis and must not be used as settled label priority.
The law is a revealing counterexample to an exclusively male founding electorate and makes the later removal of women's and Black men's voting rights a political change rather than an inherited constant.
This was not universal suffrage. Property and residence requirements excluded most women, coverture generally disqualified married women, and the same experiment included eligible Black voters before the 1807 legislature restricted the franchise to white men.