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This chapter examines the conditions under which social movements demobilize. Political process theorists have long argued that hostility in the external environment often leads to movement decline, while others have suggested that some degree of hostility will mobilize constituents. Data drawn from the periodicals of two first-wave feminist organizations, the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman's Party, are used to document the changes in the two organizations’ levels of collectivism between 1910 and 1930. Analyses show that whether and to what extent movement organizations respond to favorable or hostile external environments depends on internal organizational dynamics. Specifically, single-issue organizations respond more quickly and acutely to changes in the external environment than their multi-issue counterparts. Thus, despite past research that has touted the benefits of organizing around a single issue, this chapter documents a potential downside: the difficulty of sustaining long-term collective mobilization.

The developments that occurred as a result of the Industrial Revolution and during the British Empire hastened commerce and transformed Britain's social and cultural status quo. By the eighteenth century, there was already in London a vast number of retail shops that would inaugurate an urban world of commerce and consumerism. Magnificent and wide-ranging stores served householders with commodities that mesmerized consumers, giving way to new trends in the commercial and social fabric of London. Therefore, going shopping during the Victorian Age became mandatory for the well-off, especially for the emergent moneyed middle class. Harrods department store opened in 1864, adding new elements to the retail industry by providing a single space with various commodities. In 1909, Selfridges would transform the concept of urban commerce by imposing a more cosmopolitan outlook in the commercial arena. We shall draw attention to these two department stores, Harrods and Selfridges, analyzing how they were perceived when they first opened to the public and the effects they had on Victorian society. We shall then discuss how these department stores rendered space for social inclusion and exclusion and gender under the spell of the Victorian ethos, national conservatism, and imperialism and how they transformed social, cultural, and power dynamics. Lastly, this chapter provides insight into the social history of the late Victorian period and the early decades of the twentieth century.