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The English Civil Wars of the 1640’s provided a historical precedent for open political debate and dialogue, mass petitions, and popular demonstrations upon Parliament, from which the group now known as the Levellers were able to generate momentum and support for their movement and crystallize a radical political and social agenda. This agenda included the institution of democracy, popular sovereignty, active citizen participation in government, communal action in the public interest, and an individualistic political philosophy emphasizing natural rights and individual and civil liberties. The label “Levellers” was originally coined and used with a pejorative connotation by their opponents to deny the legitimacy of the reform movement and to imply that its members desired to level or equalize property holdings among the population.

Long before the concerted effort for woman suffrage developed during the nineteenth century, American women had exercised the right to vote. In January, 1648, Margaret Brent had petitioned the Maryland assembly for permission to vote in their proceedings, and the assembly agreed. The governor of Maryland vetoed the decision, and Brent lodged an official protest. In the same decade, in Rhode Island and New York , women participated in community affairs by voting. In 1776, in New Jersey , all references to gender were omitted from suffrage statutes. During the first fourteen years after the laws were passed, women did not vote, thinking that the laws referred only to men. By 1800, women were voting throughout New Jersey. However, a legislature made up entirely of white men voted in 1807 to change the New Jersey law to include only white male voters, with the strange argument that allowing women to vote produced a substantial amount of fraud.

The granting, in 1918, of the vote to British women age thirty and over marked the culmination of a struggle for a basic right that had been in progress for nearly half a century. The vote was a symbol of the political power that women lacked. Some saw enfranchisement of women as a means of overthrowing male tyranny in all aspects of life, whereas many others saw it as a matter of asserting the equal dignity of women and men.

Universal suffrage refers to the right of all adult citizens over the age of eighteen to vote in their country. The right to vote is constitutionally recognized as the freedom to do so, without restrictions related to sex or race. A country’s constitution also does not limit voting rights due to religious belief, wealth, or social status. In the United States, the Fifteenth Amendment of the US Constitution gave the legal right to vote to men (with certain qualifications) in 1870. The Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to vote to women in 1920. Not all countries have universal suffrage, and in some countries, the voting age may be twenty-one rather than eighteen. The first country to legally approve universal adult suffrage was New Zealand in 1893, including voting rights for men and women. France was the first to recognize universal male suffrage; this legislation occurred in 1792. The time disparity between universal suffrage and suffrage including women differs across various countries. Voting rights were not always without restrictions pertaining to property and wealth. Where these rulings were in place, very often it only afforded a minority of men the chance to vote.