{"id":46726,"date":"2016-10-30T04:00:30","date_gmt":"2016-10-30T11:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/?p=46726"},"modified":"2016-10-29T20:01:19","modified_gmt":"2016-10-30T03:01:19","slug":"first-ladies-voting-an-illustrated-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/2016\/10\/30\/first-ladies-voting-an-illustrated-history\/","title":{"rendered":"First Ladies Voting: An Illustrated History of the Right to Ballot"},"content":{"rendered":"Incumbent First Lady Hillary Clinton votes in 1996, Little Rock, Arkansas, the year her husband sought his second term as President. Little could she know that exactly twenty years later she would be on the presidential ballot. First Ladies have not been voting as long as Presidents. Florence Harding stares up at a photographer while waiting in line to vote for her husband as president in 1920. It was not until the 1920 presidential election when there was “universal” suffrage, decreed by the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution and becoming the law of the land in time for the 1920 presidential election. This made Florence Harding the first woman in American history who was able to vote for her husband as President of the United States. It wasn’t as if giving any kind of legal right to vote was a foreign idea to First Ladies. In fact, it was part of the American story since the beginning of the presidency. In 1790, a year after George Washington became the first President and his wife Martha Washington became celebrated in public as “Lady Washington,” the state of New Jersey granted “all free inhabitants,” including women, the right to vote as long as they were not held in slavery or indentured servitude. If Martha Washington had been a resident of the state of New Jersey while she was First Lady, she could have voted. \u00a0 Through her tenure as First Lady from 1797 to 1801, none of the feminist spirit that had marked Abigail Adams during the American Revolution is known to have moved her to urge her husband, the second President John Adams, into supporting a movement intending to give all American women the right to vote. It wasn’t because she had lost her earlier belief in the equal right of women to participate in government by exercising the right to vote and find legal equality on issues such as property ownership. Silhouette of Abigail Adams. It was because it was then considered strictly a decision of individual states, without interference from the federal government. Three years before the end of third President Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, in 1806, the state of New Jersey revoked from its women residents the right to vote. It was surely just a matter of coincidence that Jefferson had declared that politics was not a matter intended for the “tender breasts of ladies.” Sarah Polk,\u00a0political equal Continue reading →<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First Ladies have not been voting as long as Presidents. It was not until the 1920 presidential election when there was “universal” suffrage, decreed by the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution and becoming the law of the land in… Read More ›<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46764,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[26],"tags":[1839,1845,1806,549,657,714,927,962],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Michelle-Obama-at-an-early-voting-polling-site-in-Chicago-2016.-.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4a7VA-c9E","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46726"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}