Suffragism

In 1776 the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but for the next two centuries American suffrage laws implicitly limited who counted as a “man.” Voting regulations reflecting beliefs about class, race, gender, and age restricted participation in the American political process. These beliefs were tied to ideas of virtue central to definitions of masculinity, particularly that independent men had a right and a responsibility to participate in public life and community governance through voting. During the twentieth century, however, concepts of masculinity were gradually divorced from definitions of citizenship and suffrage.

During the colonial and Revolutionary periods, suffrage rights were restricted to male landowners on the basis of the eighteenth-century belief that manhood and civic virtue (the ability and willingness to act in the public interest rather than out of self-interest) were grounded in property ownership and the economic and political independence it bestowed. The virtuous man of independent means embodied self-sufficiency, respectability, and stability; while those without property— particularly women, children, and slaves—were seen as dependents not adequately invested in the affairs of the state to have a voice in them.

The upheaval of the American Revolution forced a reexamination of these assumptions, since many men who were not qualified to vote fought for American independence. These soldiers argued that if they were man enough to die for their country, then they were entitled to a stake in the fledgling nation. In response, several of the new states eliminated the property requirement for voting, replacing it with a less restrictive tax-paying requirement. The notion of “republican manhood” maintained the earlier associations between manhood, public virtue, and suffrage, but it now expanded to include those without property.

During the early nineteenth century the concept of masculine political virtue became completely separated from property ownership, for property restrictions on voting disappeared entirely and industrialization produced a class of nonpropertied wage earners. As a result, the belief spread that the right to vote should be connected to the man and not to property, and virtuous manhood became grounded in racial and gender identity rather than class status. White men asserted this modified idea of masculine political virtue ever more strongly as abolitionism, slave riots, and, beginning in 1848, the push for woman suffrage challenged their power. They characterized African Americans, women, and Native Americans as weak, dependent, and, therefore, unsuited to the rights of citizenship.

The Civil War (1861–65) again made the question of the vote—and its relation to manhood and to whiteness—a major national issue. Like nonpropertied men during the American Revolution, freed blacks who fought for the Union believed that their military service demonstrated their manhood and entitled them to suffrage rights. Furthermore, with the abolition of slavery many black males sought full citizenship, including the right to vote. The Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments offered them citizenship and suffrage respectively. These measures also represented the federal government's first attempt to define citizenship and voting rights—a decision that previously had been the province of the states. The North did little to enforce the new amendments, however, and southern white men excluded blacks from the public realm of politics and voting by reinstating property [Page 445]requirements and implementing poll taxes, literacy tests, complex registration requirements, and white-only primaries that successfully excluded the black voting population. Seeking to preserve the association between whiteness, manhood, and citizenship, southern white men denied full voting rights to African-American men and initiated racial segregation, or “Jim Crow”laws, to return black men to their positions of dependence. Significantly, women's attempts to gain the vote at this time also failed, further emphasizing the continued association of suffrage and citizenship with masculinity.

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