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 long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You were born into a different world that will present you with different gifts and challenges. A new vision of manhood will be called for that does not tie so closely into the more aggressive and competitive residues of our male character. You will need to search out new ways of expressing strength, showing mastery, and exhibiting courage—ways that do not depend upon confronting the world before you as an adversary.”
—Kent Nerburn (20th century)
“... the most important effect of the suffrage is psychological. The permanent consciousness of power for effective action, the knowledge that their own thoughts have an equal chance with those of any other person ... this is what has always rendered the men of a free state so energetic, so acutely intelligent, so powerful.”
—Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906)