Suffrage & Labor Movements

In 1832, the British Parliament passed a reform bill that expanded the vote to roughly one in five adult men. Reformers celebrated. Radicals pointed out that four-fifths of men and every single woman in the country still had no say in how they were governed. The champagne was premature.

This is the story of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in miniature. Every concession granted by the powerful was immediately revealed as insufficient by the people still excluded. Every door opened exposed three more that remained locked. The movements for suffrage and labor rights were not parallel struggles that happened to occupy the same decades. They were expressions of a single, grinding confrontation: the demand that political and economic systems serve the people who live inside them, not just the people who own them.

The demand was simple. The resistance was ferocious. The fight lasted over a century, and in many places, it is not over.