ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the question of continuity by looking forward to the women's suffrage and the women's labour movements of the late nineteenth century to consider how far these movements built on, or departed from, the traditions of popular radicalism. Women and the People have examined the ways in which women reworked the meanings of radicalism as they sought to become active members of a political community. The People, for them, were emphatically those outside the institutions of government and power. Sandra Holton identifies the importance a 'radical suffragist' strand within the British movement. Their analyses of these related conditions were framed as much by the language and the knowledge procedures of political economy as by those of political radicalism. Often women had felt driven to beat against the bars erected by radical culture in order to gain the knowledge they believed was theirs by right.
