Glossary on the Republic

Suffrage

Voting

It is the right to vote, and the entire history of American democracy is the history of who was allowed to hold it. Almost no one had it at the start.

Suffrage is the legal right to vote in public elections. The word comes from the Latin suffragium, a vote or the right to vote. It is the most basic power a citizen holds in a democracy, the one that decides who holds all the others.

At the founding, it was tightly restricted. In most places only white men who owned property could vote, a small fraction of the population. Women, the enslaved, the poor, and others were simply excluded from the start.

Expanding it took two centuries of struggle. Property requirements fell; the Fifteenth Amendment barred racial barriers in 1870, though they were widely evaded; the Nineteenth gave women the vote in 1920; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally gave the earlier promises teeth.

Each expansion was fought for, not granted. The people who lacked the vote had to demand it from those who held it, often over decades, against fierce resistance, because extending suffrage meant sharing power.

Origin

From the Latin suffragium, a vote; the right to vote, expanded across two centuries of struggle.

Why it matters

Suffrage is the right that turns a subject into a citizen. Every expansion of it changed who counts as a full member of the republic, and not one came easily. The fights over voter rolls, access, and eligibility that continue today are the latest chapter in the oldest American argument: who, exactly, gets to vote.