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:
“It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Only when manhood is dead—and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it—only then will we know what it is to be free.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“... woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself ... we deny that dogma of the centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations—that woman was made for man ...”
—National Woman Suffrage Association. As quoted in The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, ch. 27, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1886)