6.8 19th-Century Social Reform

Early on, unions were illegal or tightly limited. Britain's Combination Acts banned them until 1824, and in 1834 six farm laborers from Tolpuddle were sentenced to transportation to Australia for swearing a union oath, a case that caused public outrage. Skilled workers formed the first lasting “new model” unions in the 1850s, such as the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (1851), which collected dues and paid sickness and unemployment benefits. Britain's Trades Union Congress began in 1868, and unions gained clear legal status in the 1870s.

In the 1880s and 1890s “new unionism” organized unskilled workers too. The London Dock Strike of 1889 won better pay for dockworkers and showed what mass action could do. France legalized unions in 1884. Unions fought for higher wages, shorter hours and safer workplaces, and the strike was their main weapon.

As more workers gained the vote, socialists built parties to win elections. Germany's socialist party, founded in 1875 and renamed the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1890, survived Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890) and became the largest party in the Reichstag in 1912. In Britain, unions and socialist groups formed the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, which became the Labour Party in 1906. French socialists united in a single party in 1905, with Jean Jaurès as a leading voice. Socialist parties joined together in the Second International (1889). Russia's Social Democratic Labor Party (1898) was illegal and split in 1903 into Lenin's Bolsheviks and the more moderate Mensheviks. Most western socialist parties talked about revolution but in practice pushed for reforms through parliament. Older parties adapted too: Britain's Conservatives and Liberals built national organizations to win the votes of newly enfranchised men, becoming mass parties themselves.

Working men were angry that the Reform Act of 1832 gave the vote to middle-class men but not to them. In 1838 activists drafted the People's Charter. It made six demands, and the movement presented petitions with millions of signatures in 1839, 1842 and 1848. Parliament rejected all three, and the movement faded after 1848. Yet five of the six demands later became law, which makes Chartism a good example of a movement that lost in the short run and won in the long run.

• A vote for every man aged 21 and over
• A secret ballot
• No property requirement to serve in Parliament
• Pay for members of Parliament
• Equal-sized electoral districts
• Annual elections to Parliament (the only demand never adopted)

Feminists campaigned for women's rights in law, at work and in politics. Flora Tristan combined socialism and women's rights in the 1840s. In Britain, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon campaigned for married women's property rights and helped found Girton College for women at Cambridge, and Josephine Butler led a campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, which subjected women suspected of prostitution to forced medical exams. John Stuart Mill presented a women's suffrage petition to Parliament in 1866. British laws in 1870 and 1882 let married women keep their own property and earnings. Women also won entry to some universities and professions.

In Britain the campaign for the vote split in two. Suffragists, led by Millicent Fawcett's National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (1897), used peaceful petitions and lobbying. Suffragettes, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters in the Women's Social and Political Union (1903), used militant tactics such as smashing windows, arson and hunger strikes. Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison died after running onto the course at the 1913 Epsom Derby. British women over 30 who met property requirements won the vote in 1918, and women won it on equal terms with men in 1928.

Many reformers acted from religious conviction. Evangelical Christians like William Wilberforce led the campaign that ended Britain's slave trade in 1807 and slavery throughout the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. France abolished slavery in its colonies for good in 1848. Other groups ran charities, temperance societies against alcohol, Sunday schools and settlement houses. The Salvation Army, which William Booth started in London's East End in 1865 (it took that name in 1878), offered food, shelter and religion in the slums. Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) rejected socialism but defended workers' right to fair wages and to form unions, encouraging Catholic labor groups.