Working from a feminist/critical cultural studies perspective, which perceives culture and society as imbued with political tensions, I pose two central questions in this article. First, how can community-based, consumer activism be understood as a strategy adopted by marginalised groups to assert rights claims? I focus on British women's eighteenth-and nineteenth-century abolitionist boycotts as a case study of this understanding. These campaigns drew on women's socially defined roles as shoppers and consumers both to mobilise and publicise opposition to slavery, and to agitate further for women's political rights. Second, what are the implications of this case for adult education? The learning from this case study is multifaceted. It historicises the concepts of citizenship, human rights and consumerism so that, today, we can understand them as discourses that have developed to accommodate changing interests, pressures and tensions in civil society. This case also illuminates the complications of resistance, and the powerful political "incidental learning" (Foley 1999, 2001) which develops in the course of civic engagement, but is often overlooked precisely because it is unanticipated and embedded in action. (Contains 3 notes.)