¶ … Ancient Greece
Democracy: Ancient Athens and Today
The democratic process of ancient Athens as compared to today was much different. The most obvious difference is simply the scale of the process. Ancient Athens was a relatively small city-state compared to the enormous country that is the United States. There are many millions more people in today's U.S. than there were in ancient Athens. Today's elections are also much less direct than they were in Athens. The U.S. uses an electoral and representative system of democracy -- but Athens practiced direct democracy: every participating citizen was able to vote directly for or against a law or policy. In today's world, citizens are very far removed from the process for the most part and must rely on their elected representatives to represent them fairly. Given the sheer number of people in the U.S. and the many differences of our people, fair representation is harder and harder to come by.
Ancient Athens also only allowed men the right to vote. Women were excluded from the democratic process. In the U.S., this is not the case. Women were granted the right to vote in the early 20th century by the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution....
Some of them may have failed at first, such as Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis, who unsuccessfully lobbied the authors of the U.S. Constitution to include women's rights in the document. Over and above, abolitionist women drew parallels between the conditions of slavery and those of women. Anti-slavery activist Angelina Grimke wrote in 1836: "The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of
Foundation An extensive period in US history has witnessed specific segments of the nation's population (such as females, Blacks, etc.) deprived of voting rights. The female suffrage movement or struggle for winning voting rights for females continued throughout the major part of the 1800s and into the early 1900s[footnoteRef:1]. While a few states allowed female participation in elections, both as contesters and voters, before the 19th Amendment's enforcement, its ratification on
Amendment XIX Enactment of Amendment XIX and its contribution to the achievement of equal female rights The enactment of the 19th amendment empowered women on many fronts. They were allowed to vote and consequently seized the opportunity to influence political decisions. The enactment saw the legalization of contraception and even abortion. There was economic empowerment too in the process. The more common availability of reproductive services and education doors increasingly opening up,
In 1869, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, another prominent 19th century suffragist, formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) to collectively lobby for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. The NWSA also focused their attention on universal suffrage for African-Americans. Their efforts toward abolition succeeded first, as the 15th Amendment passed in 1871. Also in 1869 Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and other suffragists formed a separate suffragist
Why American Democracy Has Failed and Why the Anti Federalists were Right Introduction The Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, asserted that “all men are created equal.”[endnoteRef:2] It was an Enlightenment notion: Thomas Paine, an avid follower of the Enlightenment Movement in Europe, had written the Rights of Man to support and promote the ideas of the philosophical revolution that had gotten underway decades prior with Rousseau’s Social Contract and the latter’s
It was an important event in the nation's history because it was the first time that America was dominated by internal conflicts that challenged its democracy (Fortuna, n.d.). However, once the fighting came to an end, its significance became clear because of its effects on the American society. Despite of taking more than 60,000 lives, the American Civil War contributed to the establishment of the Democratic South and Republican North.
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