, United States (USA) (American Colonies)
1777 - All states pass laws which take away women’s right to vote.

In the years surrounding the American Revolution, ideas about liberty and political rights expanded dramatically, but those expansions were uneven and often exclusionary. By 1777, the states had begun to formalize voting laws, and in doing so, all thirteen moved to restrict the franchise to men, effectively removing women’s right to vote where it had previously existed or been ambiguously permitted.

In several states, including New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, earlier voting practices had not explicitly barred women, particularly property-holding women, from participating in elections. As new state constitutions and election laws were written, these openings were closed. Lawmakers increasingly defined voters as male citizens, reflecting prevailing beliefs about gender roles and political authority rather than the revolutionary rhetoric of universal rights.

This shift represented a significant setback for women’s political participation at the very moment the nation was being founded on principles of representation and consent. While women continued to play vital roles in public life through boycotts, petitions, and community organizing, the formal exclusion of women from the vote signaled the limits of revolutionary change. These early restrictions would stand for more than a century, shaping the long struggle that eventually led to the women’s suffrage movement and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

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