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These societies, such as the London Corresponding Society and the Manchester Constitutional Society, were forums where people analysed the changes they were facing, developed a vision of the society they wanted to create and discussed ways of making it happen. They drew directly on the ideas developed in France about the injustice of hereditary power and the right of all men to decide who should rule them. (Women's suffrage was rarely mentioned.)
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These societies were influential in giving poor and powerless people the confidence to take action to protect themselves. One of the demands they made was for a change in the electoral system. Industrial towns had expanded fast, but the electoral boundaries had not changed at all. The result was that some rural areas, with very few people, elected lots of members of Parliament, while heavily populated towns such as Manchester had no representation at all.
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