Active participation of the population in political affairs was one of the characteristic features of Britain’s colonies in North America. True to the English traditions of representation, British colonists and later the citizens of the independent United States always valued the right to cast their votes in elections. Yet while the perceived value of voting rights remained high from the 17th to the late 19th century, the actual scope of enfranchisement had expanded significantly from the colonization to the Reconstruction. From the early 17th century to 1870, Americans’ voting rights underwent three major expansions. First, the state constitutions of the newly independent USA lifted religious requirements of some Puritan colonies, then the Jacksonian democracy saw universal white male enfranchisement, and then the 15th Amendment expanded voting rights to blacks.
Before following the history of voting rights in America, it is necessary to briefly establish why this topic is crucial for the history of the United States. English political culture or the early Modern time rested on two features – the right to be judged by the jury of one’s peers and participation in government through elected representatives. These two rights constituted a cornerstone of English and later British identity, so it is a small wonder that American colonists valued them so highly. Even when a given colony did not originally provide these rights – as in New York immediately after taking it from the Dutch – the colonists sought and eventually secured their “traditional rights of Englishmen” (Corbett et al., 2021, 4.1). Then, Locke’s treatises on political philosophy popularized the idea of representative government even further (Corbett et al., 2021). Thus, from the very onset of the British colonization of North America, the political culture of these colonies revolved around voting rights to a very significant degree. This is why the development of this right signifies essential milestones in the history of the United States as a polity.
During the colonial period, the right to vote in choosing the representatives for local assemblies was limited on several accounts. Enough, the only ones who qualified for casting ballots were free white males. Apart from that, there were also property requirements – generally speaking, only those who possessed sufficient property, the total sum of which depended on the colony in question, were eligible to vote. Finally, there were also religious requirements limiting access to political participation. For example, Massachusetts’s Fundamental Orders rejected voting rights to anyone who was not a church member – which, of course, meant the Puritan church and not any other (Anderson, 1998). The Puritan colonies of early New England were not a model of religious tolerance – Governor Winthrop persecuted and exiled those like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson for opposing his views (Corbett et al., 2021). Given that, it was hardly surprising that at least some of the Protestant colonies added a religious requirement on top of all others. As a result, it limited the right to vote to a comparatively small subset of the population.
The first notable change in voting rights came as the states of the newly independent USA reshaped their political organization after the Revolutionary War. The state constitutions provided examples of democratic and aristocratic tendencies alike. For example, the Pennsylvania Constitution eliminated property requirements and expanded voting rights to every white male tax-payer that has resided in one place for at least a year (Corbett et al., 2021). At the same time, the states of New England and the Chesapeake Bay aimed to keep democracy in check by putting forth relatively high property requirements for holding public office and voting. For instance, in Massachusetts, any person willing to vote “had to be worth at least sixty pounds” apart from being male and white (Corbett et al., 2021, 7.3). Thus, the right to vote was still fairly limited, especially since the Founding Fathers never intended to establish a full democracy (Corbett et al., 2021). Yet while the property requirements still disenfranchised even a considerable part of the white male population, the new constitutions had, at the very least, abandoned explicit religious requirements that were a norm a century earlier.
Another major change in the scope of voting rights came in the early 19th century with the advent of the so-called Jacksonian democracy. As the revolutionary generation exited the political stage, the code of deference before the most affluent and accomplished individuals waned as well. Americans of the 1820s were willing to respect “towering national figures” like Washington or Jefferson but saw no reason to extend similar reverence to those of their generation (Corbett et al., 2021, 10.1). Gradually, the respect for the will of the people overshadowed the culture built around deferring to the affluent, virtuous, and well-educated elite. Since the 1790s, new state constitutions allowed universal male suffrage to bolster immigration (Corbett et al., 2021). With the elitist ideas of the Federalist Party falling out of favor after the War of 1812, original states followed suit. Connecticut abolished property requirements in 1818, and New York did the same in 1821-22 (Corbett et al., 2021). By the mid-1820s, most white American men were eligible to vote regardless of whether they owned sufficient property – the first major expansion of the right to vote in the post-Revolutionary age.
It took roughly half a century before the second similar expansion took place, largely due to the Civil War and the failure of the Presidential Reconstruction. Had Lincoln’s vision of reintegrating the South on lenient terms of his ten percent plan succeeded, it might not have been the case, since voting right for blacks were not high on his agenda. Yet Lincoln’s death and the plummeting popularity of Johnson allowed the overwhelmingly Republican Congress to take the matter into their own hands and enforce a more radical vision of the Reconstruction. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, forbade limited voting rights based on race or previous condition of servitude – although not literacy or other educational factors (Corbett et al., 2021). While not technically guaranteeing political rights to black males because of these loopholes, the new amendment still proclaimed “universal manhood suffrage” as a constitutional principle (Corbett et al., 2021, 16.3). With it, the period from colonial history to Reconstruction demonstrated yet another considerable expansion in the right to vote. While far from universal, it was broader than ever before by the end of the Reconstruction.
Speaking about the milestones in the development of the American right to vote up to the late 19th century, it would be wrong to forego the movement for women’s suffrage that developed during this time. Admittedly, it was far from achieving its goals by the end of the Reconstruction and, thus, the chronological scope of this paper. Yet the female suffrage movement has already gained some traction throughout this period, notably in the first Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Using the language of the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments proclaimed that men and women were created equal and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” (“Declaration,” 1848). Among other grievances, the document mentioned that men submitted women to laws “in the formation of which [they] had no voice,” clearly hinting at the female suffrage agenda (“Declaration,” 1848). Thus, even though the eventual achievement of female suffrage was still decades away, the movement for it was already making its first steps and gaining momentum in the mid-19th century.
As one can see, American history from the colonial period to the end of the Reconstruction may be viewed as a gradual expansion of voting rights to a broader and broader population. While the colonists valued their traditional rights as Englishmen, including the right to vote for elected representatives, the application of this right was very limited in the 17th century. Aside from the property and gender requirements, some Puritan colonies also had religious restrictions in place. While the new state constitutions of the early post-Revolutionary era did not provide for a massive increase in the number of voters, they had, at the very least, eliminated these religious requirements. The erosion of the code of deference led to the first massive expansion of voting rights by the 1820s, creating near-universal enfranchisement for white males regardless of property ownership. The next similar expansion was a cornerstone of Reconstruction – the Fifteenth Amendment enacted, if not without loopholes, universal male suffrage. This was not the end either – the work toward female suffrage, while far from completion, was already in progress.
References
Anderson, V. D. (1998). New England in the seventeenth century. In Canny, N. (Ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1: The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, pp. 193-217. Oxford UP.
Corbett, P. S., Jansen, V., Lund, J. M., Pfannestiel, T., Waskiewicz, C., & Vickery, P. (2021). U.S. History. OpenStax.
Declaration of Sentiments. (1848). Women’s Rights National Historic Park.
Relationship Between Strategy And Operations In An Organization
Strategy refers to the pattern of integrating an institution’s goals, regulations, and actions into a collective section. A well-generated strategy depending on its weaknesses and strengths, changes in the environment, and liable steps by a witty opponent, assist in collecting and assigning resources in an organization. For a competitive strategy to work, there is a need to place it into an operation. This is a clear indication of an existing relationship between a strategy and operations within an organization. Therefore, there exists a strong relationship between the strategies and operations in a firm.
The 7FE framework has 4 main phases of the strategic formulation. The first stage entails defining the objectives and goals for the entire organization. For instance, Coca-Cola’s company objectives and goals have been defined as accessible, affordable, and acceptable. The process of designing strategies entails operations starting from deliberate to emergent, just as in the UK Mcdonald’s burger chain. The series of operations applied to formulate the competitive strategy aims at positioning the enterprise to a point where it can maximize the capability values making it different from its competitors. The available generic strategies include focus, overall leadership costs, and differentiation.
The second phase provides the business review relating to the business environment. Effective strategic management entails widespread decisions which define the organization’s position relative to its environmental setup. Therefore, environmental analysis is the interpretation and assessment steps of information relating to the forces of the surrounding gathered through scanning. Aspects that need attention include monitoring the sources, identifying the significant changes, evaluating the effects, and predicting the trend.
Furthermore, the operations performed analyses profitability through customer segment process, product costing, and the strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) management tools. Effective management is intertwined with proper operation practices, therefore, helping the organization achieve its long-term goals. For instance, strategic management incorporates process and content where they require a set of operations adhering to formulated procedures striving to change the organization’s appearance in the future.
The third phase is a recap of the second one because it incorporates the objectives’ purpose into business and functional units. The purpose creates an interface between the operational, tactical, and strategic decisions. The underlying relationship between them arises from both the bottom-up and top-down approaches applied in shaping the strategy’s formulation. The business managers formulate and decide on particular objectives to be fulfilled.
The process of strategy generation is essential in building the operation, which will feed the information into both the operational and functional stages. The operations for fulfilling a balanced scorecard require the use of financial aspects for a traditional measure of accounts, customer issues relating to clients, and internal business steps for quality measurement. The use of a balanced scorecard requires a relationship between phases for the identification of key factors for success, articulation of long-term vision, and defining the critical steps. For example, a balanced scorecard fails to omit the unique aids and the management difficulties possessing their views.
The fourth phase converts the plans identified in the third section into detailed programs and budgets for use in the company. The adoption of operations by companies requires knowledge as the instrumental aspect in ensuring their success in meeting objectives. The findings are taken back to the second section for use in the future. The changes require efficiency in the involved operations in redesigning the existing strategies using top-quality management and making integration for a plan-do-check-analysis and making a proposal for a creative continuous management strategy. The changes form a strong foundation producing purpose and insight for the strategic formulation process through operation incorporation.
In conclusion, the relationship between strategy and operations creates a strong process for formulating decisions in running an organization. Operations provide a link for essential components applicable in the process of strategy formulation. Furthermore, operations require designers to take thorough steps within the detailed levels of decision-making. An effective strategy aims at managing an organization’s operational sections to compete with other institutions’ complexity. There is an effective competitive functional advantage if operations have been optimally utilized.
Shakespearean Hamlet’s And Ophelia’s Relationship
Introduction
Shakespeare’s Hamlet transcends time and generations as it illuminates universal themes, with love and revenge being among the prominent ones. The relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia serves as an example of the theme of love in the play, with its complexities illustrating the ups and downs as well as how the inner struggles the protagonist experiences affect their connection. The relationship between two characters has often been placed in a similar category as Romeo and Juliet as young and inexperienced lovers whose relationship is cursed by circumstance and fate. However, in contrast to Romeo and Juliet, the love between Hamlet and Ophelia is often implied in the play as the dominant theme is for the protagonist to achieve revenge for the death of his father (Skulsky 79). Moreover, the circumstances of their relationship drive its development, and the final term as the romance between the two characters fails because Ophelia and Hamlet share different perspectives on love and romantic relationship. Thus, the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia develops based on the main character struggling with his inner turmoil and negative emotions, which shape the nature of their connection.
Exploring Hamlet’s Personality
To his very core, Hamlet is an idealistic person that has abstract ideals and aspirations. He perceives himself as a poet and philosopher even though his role in the play does not allow him to fulfill this aspiration. From his first appearance in the novel, Hamlet presents as a moody and troubled young person who is mentally tortured by the thoughts of his father’s death and the marriage of his mother to his uncle (Nasrin et al. 84). Even though Hamlet’s mother tries comforting her son and encourages him to let go of the grief, he rebukes the mother and suspects her of betrayal. Such an exchange between Hamlet and his mother paints an image of the protagonist as someone experiencing emotions in the superlative, feeling them deeply and indiscriminately.
For example, in Hamlet’s first soliloquy, his expressions are deeply poetical, particularly about the pain he endured due to the loss of his father. The character speaks about the ghost of his father and his “sallied flesh” as something that contributes to the deepening conflict inside him (Samons 13)). Hamlet’s speech as a whole is ridden with metaphors and references to Greek mythology, which points to his royal education and intelligence. However, despite this, he rarely applies rational thinking to explore and analyze the situations in which he finds himself. Instead, he retreats inward in his deep emotions, refusing to think clearly and rationally, which wraps his mind in mental torture that prevents him from moving on from grief.
Using his wallowing as a tool for literary development, Hamlet makes attempts to present himself as a theorist and philosopher with the brooding melancholy of a romantic. If one considers Hamlet an individual who is prone to paving the way for modern philosophy, the conflict associated with his father’s ghost instructing him to take action is unsurprising. Being a thinker encouraged to take the role of a doer, Hamlet’s fate is already pre-determined. He is unable to transform his introspection into action when trying to get revenge for his father. As suggested by Javed, “Hamlet is an unwilling instrument in the gradual drift toward disaster […] a perfect example of an idealist who shrinks from accepting the role forced upon him” (327). Thus, the complex character of Hamlet makes him an idealist riddled with continuous self-exploration, which negatively influences his relationship with Ophelia.
Exploring Ophelia’s Personality
As a juxtaposition to the psychological intellectualism regularly exhibited by Hamlet, Ophelia’s character is much calmer and more practical as she is more in tune with reality. She gets attention from Hamlet, and she takes note of it, stating to her father that he “hath importuned me with love / In honorable fashion…And hath given countenance to his speech, my lord, / With almost all the holy vows of heaven” (Shakespeare 109). However, the young woman is not only concerned with love as a positive and warm emotion that any person desires. She also highly values courtship as a crucial element of a relationship between a man and a woman, which must be adequately expressed and displayed by her admirer. Nevertheless, she obeys her father’s wish to deny the attention that Hamlet exhibits toward her, which may point to her passivity. After all, her social mobility as a woman was highly limited by the power that the patriarch of a family exerted.
It is quite surprising for a Shakespearean character to renounce a lover to please her father. In contrast to Juliet, who went against the wishes of her entire family to be with her beloved Romeo, Ophelia is unique in her choice. Thus, her actions may speak more directly about her character rather than her position in society as a woman. It seems that Ophelia finds value in predictability and stability, which she expects to establish when building a relationship with a man. She does not allow herself to be in continuous pondering of her existence, which is quite the opposite of how Hamlet approaches life. In contrast to the lengthy soliloquies in which Hamlet expressed his thoughts and desires, Ophelia is short and concise in her expressions: “I think nothing my lord” (Shakespeare 105), which is evidence of her unassuming character.
Relationship Analysis
Thus, Ophelia is different from Hamlet in her character, and she does not soliloquize her feelings, nor does she question what others tell her. As mentioned by Camden, Ophelia is a “tender-hearted, delicate-minded young girl, well reared in proper obedience to her father, and experiencing what is her first introduction to the bittersweet delights of love” (249). Moreover, Ophelia is more aware that love goes beyond fantasy and the emotions that two starry-eyed young people experience.
At the start, she attempts to protect the sincerity of Hamlet when he expresses his feelings toward her while also considering the warning that her father made regarding the future of such a relationship. By considering both perspectives, Ophelia can make informed decisions drawing from the wisdom of her father, who has had more life experiences than her. Although her belief in the father’s authority is naïve, it is understandable as there is no other figure that can give her guidance. Thus, while Ophelia’s perception of love is rooted in tangible and observable actions, Hamlet’s view is much more abstract (Olivas 6). As a result, the different personal qualities and opinions on love and relationships hinder the communication between the two lovers. Besides, Hamlet’s intense desire to avenge the death of his father only contributes to misunderstandings.
The interaction between Ophelia and Hamlet at the start of Act III of the play is illustrative of the differences between them, which, unfortunately, cannot be reconciled easily. While Hamlet views his beloved Ophelia as a romantic entity, which is quite an abstract perception, Ophelia views Hamlet as her potential caretaker and provider, which is an expectation that he cannot fulfill. Living deep in his philosophical thought, Hamlet does not separate love from any other concepts that he ponders in the great question “To be or not to be?” (Shakespeare 55). As Hamlet agonizes over whether to commit suicide to end the pain of his existence, Ophelia enters at the end of his monologue, and the young king acknowledges her presence.
He compares Ophelia to a nymph, which is another reference to Greek mythology, suggesting the youthfulness and divinity of his beloved. Earlier, Hamlet already named the young woman “the celestial and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia” (Shakespeare 115). Such a characterization of Ophelia by Hamlet entails that he does not view her as a lover or a life partner. Rather, to him, the young woman is an object of admiration and a vessel into which one can pour ideas about a romantic relationship. Perceiving Ophelia as someone who should be receptive to his philosophy of love, Hamlet believes that she can offer him an opportunity to interact with the embodiment of abstract thoughts. It is possible that Hamlet loves Ophelia because she has become his self-developed representation of the highest love form or because he sees that she may conform to his relationship standards. Even though such perceptions do not align with reality, they are not insincere or unkind. They represent Hamlet’s overall propensity to detach from reality, which is also explained by his inaction toward Ophelia in the first part of the play. The love that Hamlet has for Ophelia aligns with his perceptions of romantic relationships, which are different from hers.
Unsurprisingly, the relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet does not work out in the end because the young woman’s ideas and perceptions of love are more practical. She follows the advice given by her father and abides by the social rules of conduct when writing letters back to Hamlet. She writes, “My lord, I have remembrances of yours / That I have longèd long to redeliver; / I pray you now receive them” (Shakespeare 92). This behavior shows that Ophelia finds deep value in the gestures of affection, the courtship, which used to be highly important in the Elizabethan period.
Being a young woman without significant social standing and living under the influence of a family patriarch, Ophelia expects Hamlet to fulfill her desire for security. She longs for the safe transition from the care of her father to the care of a husband, which will establish her in the role of a loving wife. When rejecting Hamlet in her letters, she does not directly deny him but rather the course of action that he takes. Ophelia wants her admirer to take the traditional and socially-anticipated route of relationships between men and women, which ends in matrimony (Balestraci 28). Hamlet, however, mocks Ophelia’s obedience to her father and societal standards because he sees their relationship as something higher and transcendent.
The behavior that Hamlet exhibits toward Ophelia is somewhat self-destructive and can be explained by the emotional terror that he experiences when grieving the loss of his father and planning revenge. Therefore, it seems that the young king never wanted his relationship to develop into something serious as he acts in a self-destructive way and with deep emotional intensity, which does not allow his connection with Ophelia to deepen. While his love is deep, it is the love of a poet that thinks in abstract superlatives. When Ophelia rejects him, Hamlet perceives the rejection with the same level of depth, denouncing her. In the end, Ophelia exclaims, “Oh, what a noble mind is here overthrown,” suggesting that her former beloved may have gone mad (Shakespeare 147). Because Ophelia’s understanding of love and relationships is different, she cannot grasp the emotions that Hamlet experiences, which drives them apart.
Conclusion
The relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia teaches the readers and viewers of the play about the importance of a similar worldview for building meaningful and lasting connections. From the very start, Hamlet is deep in his existential inquiry and views the world through intangible phenomena. He is broken after losing his father and is preoccupied with the desire to avenge him, and his love for Ophelia presents an outlet for his emotions and the poetic underpinnings of his personality. For Ophelia, love is defined by measurable acts of kindness and a promise of stability as she is grounded in reality and desires to become a wife. The difference in the lovers’ perceptions of a romantic relationship does not allow them to stay together as they are unable to communicate their expectations regarding love effectively.
Works Cited
Balestraci, Mary. “Victorian Voices: Gender Ideology and Shakespeare’s Female Characters.” Repository Library, 2012. Web.
Camden, Carroll. “On Ophelia’s Madness.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2, 1964, pp. 247-255.
Javed, Tabassum. “Perfect Idealism in Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet.” Dialogue, vol. 8, no. 3, 2013, p. 327.
Nasrin, Farzana, et al. “William Shakespeare: Soliloquies and Asides in Hamlet.” International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature, vol. 4, no. 10, 2016, pp. 82-92.
Olivas, T. A. “Who is Ophelia? An Examination of the Objectification and Subjectivity of Shakespeare’s Ophelia.” Digitalscholarship, 2015. Web.
Samons, Loren. “Noble Minds and Nymphs: The Tragic Romance of Hamlet and Ophelia.” CLA Journal, vol. 6, pp. 12-21.
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Skulsky, Harold. “Revenge, Honor, and Conscience in “Hamlet”.” PMLA, vol. 85, no. 1, 1970, pp. 78-87.