12 February

For any social progress or change, you'll find a rivalry between elite groups, using ordinary people as leverage. For example universal voting, which we're taught and assume was introduced because of pressure from ordinary people and their activism, was really the strategy employed by urban industrialists in the 19th century to loosen the grip on power of the landed aristocracy. Adding ordinary people to the vote, most of whom were working in cities, gave industrialists an enormous political advantage over the dominant landed gentry. It allowed them to take over top spot in social status hierarchies.