New Jersey Women's Suffrage Amendment
Election date October 19, 1915
Topic Suffrage
Status dDefeated
Type Constitutional amendment	Origin State legislature

New Jersey Women's Suffrage Amendment was on theballot as alegislatively referred constitutional amendment inNew Jersey onOctober 19, 1915. It wasdefeated.

Election results

Results are officially certified.

Source

Background

State women's suffrage ballot measures

See also:State women's suffrage ballot measures

The19th Amendment of theU.S. Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920. The 19th Amendment prohibited the government from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of sex. Therefore, women were guaranteed the right to vote in the U.S. Constitution.

Before the 19th Amendment, the women's suffrage movement also campaigned for changes to state constitutions to provide women with a right to vote. Suffragists Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, in their bookWoman Suffrage and Politics (1923), wrote that state ballot measures "spun the main thread of suffrage activity" in the movement's earlier years and were seen as stepping stones to national suffrage. "I don't know the exact number of States we shall have to have," said Susan B. Anthony, "but I do know that there will come a day when that number will automatically and resistlessly act on the Congress of the United States to compel the submission of a federal suffrage amendment." When asked about federal support for women's suffrage in 1908, PresidentTheodore Roosevelt advised the suffrage movement to "Go, get another State."^[1]

Between 1867 and August 18, 1920, 54 ballot measures to grant women's suffrage were on the ballot in 30 states. Fifteen (15) of the ballot measures were approved, giving women the right to vote in 15 states. Since women did not have suffrage until after the ballot measures were approved, male voters decided the outcome of suffrage ballot measures.

Map of states that voted on suffrage ballot measures

The following is a map of which states approved and which states rejected women's suffrage ballot measures before the 19th Amendment. Suffrage was on the ballot at least once in 30 of 48 states (Alaska and Hawaii were not states until 1959). Of the 15 states that passed suffrage ballot measures, eight failed to pass measures on their first attempts. In Oregon and South Dakota, for example, suffrage measures were placed before voters at six elections before one was passed. In Utah and Wyoming, voters decided and approved women's suffrage as one provision of a ballot measure to adopt a state constitution. You canclick on a state to learn more about the number of women's suffrage ballot measures that were voted on and in what years in that state.

See also

Footnotes

v • e 1915 ballot measures •Alabama 1915 ballot measures •California 1915 ballot propositions •Maryland 1915 ballot measures •Massachusetts 1915 ballot measures •Michigan 1915 ballot measures •New York 1915 ballot measures •Ohio 1915 ballot measures •Texas 1915 ballot measures •

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