How is the 'success' or 'effectiveness' of social movements best Essay

How is the 'success' or 'effectiveness' of social movements best evaluated Discuss with reference to the Chartist and women's s - Essay Example People were organising for purpose, as they had over time to mixed results. While mass social movement as power in numbers seemed a logical vehicle for political and societal change, these changes as desired did not come easily or necessarily in the forms intended by their proponents. Social Movements Come to the UK From the days in the early nineteenth century, when a popular coalition brought down the monarch of Charles V in the later part of the century, the tendency toward mass movements had been growing as a popular uprising of sorts against government power versus the rights of people. Reverberations from France’s ‘revolutionary propensities’ (Tilly, 2005: 285) had naturally spread to Great Britain, where politicians for good reason began to fret that similar actions would be forthcoming and disruptive. As early as 1830 Tilly (2005) reports incidences including the Duke of Wellington and the London Police receiving offensive shouts from onlookers regarding a current institution of martial law. ‘Chastened by the experience’ , (Tilly, 2005:287) Parliament introduced motions to limit the practice—a move immediately countered by Wellington. ... 1-2) describes the movement as ‘a radical campaign for parliamentary reform of inequities remaining after the [passage of] the Reform Act of 1832. The term ‘radical’ may be used advisedly, depending upon which class and social status of the day was describing the movement. The middle and upper classes found the Six Step demands of William Lovell’s â€Å"People’s Charter† a frightening threat to their hold over society, with its ‘radical list of: votes for all men; equal electoral districts; abolition of the requirement that Members of Parliament be property owners; payment for M.P.s; annual general elections; and the secret ballot. (Everett 1987: par. 1-2). A precursor to the Chartist movement, the London Working Men’s Association and other movement organisations had promoted equality for the working classes. By the mid-1800s, their leaders had determined that democracy and its practices was the only practicable route to social equ ality and justice. What they did not know, or realise was that those forces presenting themselves as democratic would work against such equality in ways that would undermine any movement’s attempt to rectify ills. By 1839 the Chartists had collected one and a quarter million signatures in support of the Charter which, in that same year, was summarily rejected by a vote of 235 to 46 by the middle and upper class dominated House of Commons. Discouraged and angered at the slight, many of the movement’s leaders threatened to call for a general nationwide strike and were soon arrested. Incensed, their supporters marched on the prison where their compatriots were being held and soldiers fired on them, killing twenty-four and wounding forty. A second petition with three million