By Jeffrey V. Moy, North Jersey History and Genealogy Center
While ratifying the 19th Amendment in 1920 extended suffrage to American women at the federal level, New Jersey was one of the few states whose original constitution already had granted voting rights to women — albeit only to single and widowed property owners.
When the New Jersey state constitution was adopted on July 2, 1776, the Provincial Congress included a clause stating:
All inhabitants in this colony, who are worth 50 pounds proclamation money, clear estate in the same, and have resided within the county in which they claim a vote for twelve months immediately preceding the election, shall be entitled to vote for Representatives in Council and Assembly; and also for all other public officers, that shall be elected by the people of the country at large.
Since voters only needed to be landowners with one year’s residency, some free African American New Jerseyans cast ballots in early local and national elections, as well as non-citizens, until an 1807 amendment to a ‘voting rights’ statute took the vote from all but white males over 21 years of age.
The disenfranchisement of New Jersey’s African American and female citizens sparked a new movement for suffrage in the Garden State.
The New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association (NJWSA) formed in 1867 with the mission of campaigning for the right to vote, to become full citizens, as well as fight for better wages and pursue legislation that protected both women and their families.
In most states during this era women could not enter legal contracts, own property, obtain a formal education, gain a divorce from abusive spouses, nor obtain sole custody of their children.
By 1869 the movement split into the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), which advocated for a federal amendment, and the National Woman’s Party (NWP) that sought state-based referenda.
Nevertheless, the suffrage movement gained little traction as it faced powerful opposition among industrial leaders in the north who relied upon the cheap labor provided by women and child workers, and those southern business owners and citizens who were heavily invested in black disenfranchisement.
Some of the most ardent opponents to the suffrage movement were affluent and middle class women who argued that if females strayed from their traditional domestic realm they would become corrupted by the gruesome and vicious world of politics.
Many also perceived a serious risk to their own social prominence and influence if poor and working women wielded an equal amount of political power, particularly African Americans and the recent waves of southern and eastern European immigrants.
Julia Sampson Hurlbut, who was the daughter of banker Frank Mosely Hurlbut and Martha Newton Sampson, rose to become one of Morristown’s most prominent suffragists.
Julia joined the Suffrage Movement around 1915 and identified with its radical wing, the National Woman’s Party (NWP) where she served as an envoy to states that had already extended voting rights to women.
The NWP was considered militant because it utilized public protests among its tactics, which violated the traditional role of women as moral gatekeepers who were expected to maintain proper households, raise civic-minded children, and support religious and social causes.
Julia helped organize the Bastille Day picketing of the White House on July 14 1917, to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to push for Congressional passage of the 19th Amendment. She led the first group of 15 protestors while carrying a banner that read “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” which attracted a large crowd before police arrested them for unlawful assembly.
The protest earned Julia a 60-day sentence at the infamous Occoquan Workhouse, which was known for its substandard conditions.
Following her release, Julia gave speeches around New Jersey before traveling for months across the country gathering support for voting rights. As the United States entered World War I, she believed it was her patriotic duty to support the war effort by joining the Red Cross where she learned to sew, knit, and prepare surgical dressings while also raising money for the Liberty Loans that funded America’s military forces.
Julia’s war service took her abroad to France, where she first worked as head of the YMCA’s Chatillion-sur Seine sub-district headquarters of the American Army School. Later, she was appointed to supervise the Officer’s Club in town and manage hut canteens in neighboring camps.
Patriotism and the desire to support husbands, brothers, and sons fighting overseas may have been the primary driver of American women’s wartime efforts. However, suffrage leaders acknowledged this duty also served a strategic purpose.
While some radical activists continued their protests outside the White House — eliciting increasingly violent responses from crowds of men in the process — mainstream suffragists knew it would be harder for Americans to deny the right to vote to the hundreds of thousands of women who served overseas as nurses and physicians; kept munition plants and farms operating on the homefront; raised war funds; and made a multitude of other contributions, all while tending to domestic obligations and their children.
President Wilson ultimately succumbed to pressure from the activists, and asked his congressional peers to support the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. The House passed the suffrage amendment on May 21, 1919, with Senate passage following on June 4, and ratification came some 14 months later.
Once the Amendment was up for ratification the NJWP had become a major annoyance to the NJWSA, which did everything it could to disavow the former, including excluding any mention of its members when recording the history of New Jersey’s suffrage movement.
It was during her overseas war service that Julia Hurlbut met her future husband, Lt. John Ter Bush Bissell of the 7th Machine Gun Battalion, 2nd Division A.E.F., and a graduate of West Point.
Bissell had just been decorated with the Croix de Guerre for his participation in defending the bridge over the Marne during the Battle of Chateau-Thaserry, and was assigned to be a machine gun instructor in Chatillion sur Seine, which is where he met Julia.
Julia and John married on the front on May 19, 1919, when she was 26 and he was 37 years old. She stayed with John in France for the duration of the war until 1922.
Upon returning stateside, Bissell became a career officer and was stationed in Baltimore, Md.; Kentucky; Washington, D.C.; Pittsburgh, and New York. Julia followed John and settled into the role of an officer’s wife. They had a daughter, Barbara Bissell, while stationed at West Point in the 1940s.
The couple eventually retired to Carmel, CA, to a home overlooking the ocean, and were longtime members of the Adirondack League Club, where they owned a hunting and fishing lodge and also traveled to Maine and Eastern Canada on fishing trips.
As the spouse of an active duty officer, Julia was ineligible to vote during the 1920s, and there is no record that she ever exercised the right for which she fought so hard.
Our new virtual exhibit, The Legacy of Women in Morris County, is currently on view at the Morristown & Morris Township Library’s website.
Author’s Note: This edition corrects the original article that erroneously stated New Jersey women lost the right to vote in 1844, when in fact this occurred in 1807.
Sources:
- “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote”, Companion to the Library of Congress exhibition, with a forward by Carla Hayden, Rutgers University Press, Library of Congress; New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, NJ
- Carol Simon Levin and Delight Wing Dodyk, “Reclaiming Our Voice: An Overview of New Jersey’s Role in the Fight for Woman Suffrage”, Garden State Legacy, #47, March 2020.
- Delight W. Dodyk, Education and Agitation: The Woman Suffrage Movement in New Jersey, dissertation in fulfillment of Ph.D., Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, May 1997.
- “The Pivotal Right: Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls,” Rutgers University Special Collections and University Archives exhibit, New Brunswick, NJ, 1998
- Turning Point Woman’s Suffrage Memorial Website: Julia Hurlbut (1882-1962)
- Lynn Wenzel, “New Jersey Suffragist – Julia Sampson Hurlbut”, adapted from a biographical sketch first published at Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States
- Susan L. Ditmire, “Peticoat Electors: New Jersey women had the right to vote as early as 1776, so how was it lost?”, GardenStateLegacy.com. Iss. 7, March 2010
For a behind the scenes look at our collections and additional information on New Jersey history, follow us on Twitter @NJHistoryCenter and Facebook; and read our other MorristownGreen.com articles here.
Thank you for the comment, Virginia. I did not encounter the 1807 bill in my research and am interested to learn more about it. If you have time to forward references to additional sources to njhgc@jfpl.org then I’d look forward to following up. Many thanks!
Actually, it was not the 1844 New Jersey constitution that took the right to vote away from women; they lost it much earlier.
Morristown’s Lewis Condict sponsored the 1807 bill that took the right to vote away from women, free blacks, and non-citizens, but eliminated the property qualification for voting, dramatically expanding the eligible pool of male voters, to the benefit of his Whig party.