Universal manhood suffrage is a form of voting rights in which all adult males within a political system are allowed to vote, regardless of income, property, religion, race, or any other qualification. It is sometimes summarized by the slogan, "one man, one vote".
In the United States, the rise of Jacksonian democracy in the 1820s led to a close approximation of universal manhood suffrage among whites being adopted in most states (notably excepting Rhode Island until the aftermath of the Dorr Rebellion), and poorer, frontier citizens felt better represented. Most African-American males still remained excluded; though the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868, upholds their voting rights, they were still denied the right to vote in many places for another century.
As women began to win the right to vote in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the goal of universal manhood suffrage was replaced by universal suffrage.
Famous quotes containing the words universal, manhood and/or suffrage:
“People get real comfortable with their features. Nobody gets comfortable with their hair. Hair trauma. It’s the universal thing.”
—Jamie Lee Curtis (b. 1958)
“The government will ... go on in the highly democratic method of conscripting American manhood for European slaughter.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“I would rather be known as an advocate of equal suffrage than to speak every night on the best-paying platforms in the United States and ignore it.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)