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Voting--The Pinnacle Of Democracy, Suffrage For All. While

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Voting--the pinnacle of democracy, suffrage for all. While it took a couple of centuries for the United States to guarantee universal suffrage, we now have it, regardless of sex or race. The struggle of acquiring suffrage is a long history, one that we as Americans paradoxically praise and condemn, but it is history, and now we must look towards the future. Yet, Harvard Professor Dr. Judith Shklar argues otherwise in her lecture “Voting” where she navigates the history behind the long battle for universal suffrage in the United States. More importantly, she provokes the audience when she presents an unorthodox history of the struggle for suffrage:
They[Americans] have seen them [voting and earning] as attributes of an American citizen…The…show more content…
As a result, while both social status and standing are relative, the latter is seemingly more feasible than the other to obtain, especially with natural-rights theory as the foundation of American democracy. Later, Shklar mentions that “natural-rights theory makes it very difficult to find good reason for excluding anyone from full political membership” (Shklar 395). The result of having the theory of natural rights as the backbone is that anyone who is denied the vote would naturally be deprived of exercising their voice, or in another word, a slave. Eventually when the white manhood suffrage movement used the word slave, they would often not simply just refer to “reduced political independence…[but] the actual condition of most American blacks” (Shklar 396). Shklar highlights the fear and apathy that white men and consecutive suffrage groups had towards being a slave, one who is stripped of rights and humanity which are both synthesized into the vote. As she describes the fights for suffrage, Shklar will often bring up primary sources that shed light to the atmosphere at the time. Of course, this reflects the common characteristic of any academic, but this is not an academic paper where she is including her citations; this is a lecture that she is giving. She raises direct sources from historical figures and historians to highlight behavior
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