Sep 19, 2026 · 28 min · 10 segments
Wendy Chmielewski ## Program transcript: **Grant Reeher:** Welcome to the "Campbell Conversations." I'm Grant Reeher. Most of us are familiar with the basic story of the women’s struggle to earn the…
Well, as we know, the right to vote, the qualifications for the right to vote, at least in the first half to three quarters of the 19th century, were completely set by the states.
some cases, states... allowed women to run for office even if they couldn't vote.
The sort of social and cultural answer is that a lot of the first offices that women ran for and were elected to had to do with education and schools.
And socially women were seen as nurturing the first educators of children.
Teachers were by the halfway point of the 19th century, beginning to be the majority of teachers.
And so a lot of legislators, voters, who were mostly men at the time, saw women who could run for education offices.
And so that was some of the first ones they campaigned for successfully, though not all, but some of them.
That's interesting because I am more familiar with later parts of the story for women's path into elective office and the school board still factors quite heavily on those as a springboard.
So one question that occurred to me as I was thinking about this is there are... specific restrictions on federal elected office.
You have age, and for the president, you have being born in the United States or in a U.S. territory.
But the Constitution didn't really have that kind of specific language about voting being just for men, right? Yes,
I think that at the time that the constitution was written before many of the amendments, I don't think that anybody thought or few people thought that women and non-property holders would have the right to vote.
And nobody thought that women could be property holders, of course, because married women had no legal identity and could not own property in their own names.
And they actually could vote, I think, until 1809 in town meetings in Massachusetts.
Well, as we know, the right to vote, the qualifications for the right to vote, at least in the first half to three quarters of the 19th century, were completely set by the states.
some cases, states... allowed women to run for office even if they couldn't vote.
The sort of social and cultural answer is that a lot of the first offices that women ran for and were elected to had to do with education and schools.
And socially women were seen as nurturing the first educators of children.
Teachers were by the halfway point of the 19th century, beginning to be the majority of teachers.
And so a lot of legislators, voters, who were mostly men at the time, saw women who could run for education offices.
And so that was some of the first ones they campaigned for successfully, though not all, but some of them.
That's interesting because I am more familiar with later parts of the story for women's path into elective office and the school board still factors quite heavily on those as a springboard.
So one question that occurred to me as I was thinking about this is there are... specific restrictions on federal elected office.
You have age, and for the president, you have being born in the United States or in a U.S. territory.
But the Constitution didn't really have that kind of specific language about voting being just for men, right? Yes,
I think that at the time that the constitution was written before many of the amendments, I don't think that anybody thought or few people thought that women and non-property holders would have the right to vote.
And nobody thought that women could be property holders, of course, because married women had no legal identity and could not own property in their own names.
And they actually could vote, I think, until 1809 in town meetings in Massachusetts.
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