Query:
"And Hagerman was hardly a rich man. “Tax records list his profession as householder — essentially a tenant — and his property as one cattle and one dog,” Dr. Mead said."
how does a person own "one cattle"???
1
This is a very inspiring article. I was particularly cheered to see in the photo in the print version the names of three Stout women (Caty, Nelly, and Elizabeth) who went to the polls together.
Kudos to the Museum of the American Revolution for putting this exhibition together. I have very positive memories of visiting that museum when it opened and noting then the attention paid by the curators to our unfinished revolution and the ongoing efforts to live up to our stated ideals.
A good reminder, also, that we need to be vigilant about expanding and exercising the right to vote. Vote early, vote by mail, or go to the polls -- and take a few friends!
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Wyoming, 1870. Women voted, served on juries, and held public office.
4
“In early New Jersey, we have women voting and African-Americans voting,” he said. “This is a story both about what we might have been, and about who we’ve become.”
While Dr. Mead, being part of the professoriat, may intend to suggest that we have a long way to go with women/minority voting, the truth is that in today's US no eligible person is unable to vote -- unless they choose not to provide evidence of who they are.
@james
"... the truth is that in today's US no eligible person is unable to vote -- unless they choose not to provide evidence of who they are."
Not true. Voting remains far more difficult than it should be -- and hotly contested -- due largely to Republican efforts to restrict voter's rights. The same battles need to be re-fought time and again.
Consider North Dakota. "Many Native American reservations do not use traditional addresses, and the law — which the Republican-controlled North Dakota Legislature passed shortly after a Democrat, Heidi Heitkamp, won a close Senate race in 2012 with strong support from Native Americans — meant they could not vote with an ID that listed a post office box as an address. Ms. Heitkamp was defeated by Kevin Cramer, a Republican, in 2018." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/us/politics/north-dakota-voter-id.html
Consider Florida -- Where legislators added a requirement that former felons pay all fines after voters gave ex-felons the right to vote.
Consider the de facto bar on voting imposed by localities that misallocate voting sites, and force people to wait in hours-long lines.
16
Wonderful article! As someone who teaches this history, I really love how into the weeds it gets. But I have one quibble. It isn't really a "dark irony" that broadening the franchise to include all white men went hand-in-hand with disenfranchising property-owning women and African Americans. It instead reflects a shift in the rationale for voting eligibility. In a society that even after the Revolution still privileged social rank and wealth, allowing property-owning women and free African Americans to vote was not a completely impossible stretch. But with the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the end of property qualifications, race and sex became the essential and defining attributes of a voter. Now, one could vote simply because one was a white man, not because one could show an independent, vested interest in the community -- a status that usually only white men could attain.
6
"...featured in an exhibition opening in August cheekily titled 'When Women Lost the Vote'..." I don't know why you see this title as "cheeky." It seems important to understand this was a right we had and lost. It's that loss that surely moves many of us.
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distinct women's names, not "unique women's names". They were distinct women, but names aren't unique.
3
@Jonathan Katz If no other woman in the area, then or possibly even now, had that name, then would it not be both distinct and unique? I can think of a handful of persons I've met over the years with truly unique names.
4
Why is this in the Arts section?And why isn't the museum location given? I found it easily. Is the exhibit traveling? Did women run for election as well as vote?It is obvious that an historian did not write this article; too bad.
11
@Scientist It is in the "Arts" section because the exhibit is in a museum, a cultural entity.
No, the reporter is not a historian. But the person who put the exhibit together is.
5
Here we have white men disenfranchising women by claiming fraud of which they were guilty. Until the philosophy that holds one gender superior and the other inferior is finally discredited and abandoned there will be, as Bob Marley sang it, war.
Until women unite to support one another and choose a woman as president, there will be war. It is time for women to unite and vote for women!
25
I've read that letting NJ women vote goes back to NJ's Dutch tradition of limiting voting to property holders. So, if the husband died and the wife was left the property, she also was able to vote.
10
"On the Trail of America’s First Women to Voter" Shouldn't that be "to Vote".
5
Women, written out of history again?
Why have we never heard about women in the US voting until some of the Western states permitted it, which was also in advance of universal suffrage?
Congratulations to these persistent researchers! Good job!
28
Jersey girls! Always causing trouble...
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@Hazel You rock!
3
I would love to see this exhibit, but until then, are these polls published online anywhere?
8
Amazing. Feels like the discovery of a sunken pirate ship.
[Given the din of controversy over women voting (not to mention the fact that voting often took place in taverns awash with drunkenness and guns), did they go to the polls together for safety? Or perhaps even, Dr. Micucci speculates, out of a sense of proto-feminist solidarity? “We can really ask if this is the beginning of some sort of organization among women,” she said.]
I’d love see a film about this so I think Greta Gerwig needs to get chop-chopping on the screenplay!
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