On 16 August 1819 a crowd of perhaps sixty thousand people gathered on St Peter's Field in Manchester. Many were cotton workers in their Sunday best, marching in from surrounding towns behind banners reading "Liberty" and "Universal Suffrage." They had come to hear the radical speaker Henry Hunt call for parliamentary reform. Local magistrates panicked and sent in mounted yeomanry, then regular cavalry, to arrest Hunt and disperse the crowd. Swinging sabers, they cut their way through. Around fifteen to eighteen people were killed and hundreds injured. A journalist named the event Peterloo, mocking the victory at Waterloo four years earlier. It became a symbol for every later movement demanding a voice for working people.

No vote, no union

In 1819 Manchester, a city of more than 100,000 people, had no member of Parliament of its own. Only a small minority of adult men could vote, and the rules were a patchwork. Workers who tried to bargain collectively faced the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, which made trade unions illegal. Those acts were repealed in 1824, but unions remained legally vulnerable.

In 1834 six farm laborers in the Dorset village of Tolpuddle formed a society to resist wage cuts. They were convicted of swearing a secret oath and sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia. The Tolpuddle Martyrs became a national cause; huge petitions and protest marches followed, and they were pardoned in 1836.

The Reform Act and its limits

The Great Reform Act of 1832 gave seats to growing industrial towns such as Manchester and Birmingham and removed many tiny "rotten boroughs." But it extended the vote mainly to middle-class property owners. Most working men were still excluded, and some felt betrayed after campaigning for reform.

Chartism

In 1838 a group of London artisans led by William Lovett drafted the People's Charter, with six demands:

• A vote for every man over twenty-one.
• A secret ballot.
• No property qualification for members of Parliament.
• Payment for members, so working men could afford to serve.
• Equal constituencies.
• Annual elections for Parliament.

Chartism became the first mass working-class political movement in history. It produced newspapers, notably the Northern Star, and huge petitions. The 1842 petition claimed more than three million signatures and had to be carried to Parliament in sections. Parliament rejected every petition. The movement divided between "moral force" Chartists, who favored persuasion and education, and "physical force" Chartists, who were willing to threaten violence; an armed rising at Newport in Wales in 1839 was crushed. After a final petition in 1848 was found to include fake names such as "Victoria Rex," the movement faded. Yet five of its six points later became law. Only annual parliaments never arrived.

Women took part in Chartism too, forming female Chartist associations, collecting signatures and organizing boycotts of hostile shopkeepers, even though the Charter itself asked the vote only for men. Their activism helped train a generation of later campaigners.

Cooperation and unions

Other workers built institutions of their own. The mill owner Robert Owen ran his New Lanark mills in Scotland with shorter hours, better housing and an infant school, arguing that character was shaped by conditions. In 1844 a group of weavers and other workers founded the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, a shop owned by its members and sharing profits according to purchases. Their rules became the model for the worldwide cooperative movement.

Skilled workers formed stable unions such as the Amalgamated Society of Engineers in 1851. The Trades Union Congress first met in Manchester in 1868, and laws in the 1870s gave unions firmer legal protection. Later, unskilled workers organized too. In 1888 young women at the Bryant and May match factory in London struck against fines and dangerous conditions, including the jaw-rotting disease caused by white phosphorus. A year later, London dockers won a strike for a minimum of sixpence an hour, the "dockers' tanner." Working men in towns gained the vote in 1867 and many rural workers in 1884, though all women still waited.

Women in the movement

Women took part in these struggles from the start. In 1819 women in Blackburn, Manchester and other northern towns formed female reform societies, and at St Peter's Field Mary Fildes, president of the Manchester Female Reform Society, stood on the speakers' platform with a banner. Women were among the dead at Peterloo, and more than a hundred were among the injured. In the Chartist years women organized their own associations, gathered signatures, boycotted hostile shopkeepers and spoke at meetings, even though the Charter itself asked votes only for men. Some Chartists argued that women should be included, and the question returned later in the century when campaigners for women's suffrage took up the cause.

Worked example: choosing tactics as a Chartist

It is 1839. Parliament has rejected your petition. Some comrades want a general strike; others talk of arms. What do you weigh?

• Legitimacy: peaceful mass action wins sympathy, while violence lets authorities paint the movement as a threat.
• Power: petitions alone can be ignored, so what pressure can workers apply lawfully?
• Organization: lasting institutions such as newspapers, unions and cooperatives build strength over years.
• Time horizon: movements that lose in the short run can still win the argument.

Chartism failed in its own time and succeeded in the long run, which makes it one of history's best lessons in patience.