Electricity would remain little more than an intellectual curiosity for millennia until 1600, when the English scientist William Gilbert made a careful study of electricity and magnetism, distinguishing the lodestone effect from static electricity produced by rubbing amber. He coined the New Latin word electricus ("of amber" or "like amber", from [elektron], the Greek word for "amber") to refer to the property of attracting small objects after being rubbed. This association gave rise to the English words "electric" and "electricity", which made their first appearance in print in Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646.
Further work was conducted by Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay. In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research in electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In June 1752 he is reputed to have attached a metal key to the bottom of a dampened kite string and flown the kite in a storm-threatened sky. A succession of sparks jumping from the key to the back of his hand showed that lightning was indeed electrical in nature.

In medieval France and several other European countries, voting for city and town assemblies and meetings was open to the heads of households. In Sweden, conditional woman suffrage was granted during the age of liberty between 1718 and 1771, when taxpaying women listed in the guilds as professionals were allowed to vote.

Women were entitled to vote in the Corsican Republic in 1755 whose Constitution stipulated a national representative assembly elected by all inhabitants over the age of 25, both women (if unmarried or widowed) and men. Women's suffrage was ended when France annexed the island in 1769. The modern movement for women's suffrage originated in France in the 1780s and 1790s, where Antoine Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges advocated women's suffrage in national elections.
In 1756, Lydia Chapin Taft became the first legal woman voter in colonial America. This occurred under British rule in the Massachusetts Colony. This was in a New England town meeting and she voted on at least three occasions in Uxbridge, Massachusetts