In his speech at the Woman's Rights Convention, 1853, in New York, Rev. John Pierpont said: "I can go back forty years; and forty years ago, when most of my present audience were not in, but behind, their cradles, passing a stranger, through the neighboring State of New Jersey, and stopping for dinner at an inn, where the coach stopped, I saw at the bar where I went to pay, a list of the voters of the town stuck up. My eye ran over it, and I read to my astonishment the names of several women. What!' I said, 'do women vote here?' 'Certainly,' was the answer, 'when they have real estate.' Then the question arose in my mind, why should not women vote: Laws are made regulating the tenure of real estate, and the essence of all republicanism is, that they who feel the pressure of the law should have a voice in its enactment."
DEFECTS IN THE CONSTITUTION OF NEW JERSEY.
In a very singular pamphlet published in Trenton, 1779, called "Eumenes: A collection of papers on the Errors and Omissions of the Constitution of New Jersey," the writer is very severe upon the fact that women were allowed to exercise the same right as the sterner sex; observing that "Nothing can be a greater mockery of this inalienable right, than to suffer it to be exercised by persons who do not pretend any judgment on the subject."[1]
Extract from "Eumenes," page 31, No. 8: "Defects of the Constitution respecting the Qualification of Electors and Elected":
It has ever been a matter of dispute upon the Constitution, whether females, as well as males, are entitled to elect officers of Government. If we were to be guided by the letter of the charter, it would seem to place them on the same footing in this particular; and yet, recurring to political right and the nature of things, a very forcible construction has been raised against the admission of women to participate in the public suffrage.
The 4th Article of the Constitution declares that "all the inhabitants
- ↑ Frank Leslie's Magazine, Feb., 1877.
