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molly bloom
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Lundenwic
Oct 2001 time: 15:34
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quote: Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
quote: Three examples of the world turned upside down with minimal bloodshed or destruction. |
All three were results of gradual change and long, long periods of debate and shifting ideas. Neither renders Burke's point wrong. Besides other traditions still were in existance, unlike the French Revolution's aftermath. |
Women's votes came about as a result of gradual change? What, they had a 25% vote, then a 50% vote, then a 75% vote?
The enfranchisement of women is a major overturning of tradition, a tradition set in stone in politics and religion.
They either had the vote or they didn't- you can't be slightly pregnant.
The 1832 Reform Act overturned a traditional voting system that had seen members of the ruling oligarchy safely ensconced in power from mediaeval times- Old Sarum, an earthwork, sent two M.P.s to Parliament, having only seven voters, whose franchise was effectively controlled by the local landowner.
The 1830s and the 1840s were felt even at the time (as Dickens's writings show) to be a revolutionary era in Great Britain- effectively achieving without the same degree of bloodshed what the Revolution in France had originally set out to do. There were riots in Bristol centred around the 1832 Reform Act, and disturbances associated with the more militantly inclined Chartist Movement (a meeting put down by soldiers in Newport in Wales for instance) but it was more of a velvet revolution than either the American or the French Revolutions.
The 1867 Reform Act was also seen in its own day as revolutionary, as Matthew Arnold's 'Culture and Anarchy' and some of William Morris's writings confirm. The further extension of the franchise to the lower classes, it was felt, would sound the death knell for high culture and privilege.
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