the populists were not farm labourers, they were the owners of the farms. many of them would have even descended from slave owners, and a few may have been old enough to have owned slaves. they were not the new industrial work force, although there is an anti-european streak of xenophobia in the very christocentric nature of their puritanical, evangelically rooted writing, and it came out in the labour suppressing movements that progressives supported in the first third of the twentieth century. these weren't the irish, or the germans. these were old english, protestant families, gentrified within the old solid south of the democratic party. so, these weren't people that might have had to sell their labour to survive, or anything like that. no, no - that would be beneath them. that would be behaviour befitting of a lower class of people.
so, laws against child labour would not do. and, jim crow was fine.
even their views towards women are really rooted in property. while most people are familiar with susan b. anthony (herself, hardly a liberal reformer), it was really a strange route to winning the vote. what the susan b anthony case actually says was that there was never a law against women voting in the first place, but only a cultural restriction or taboo. so, the 14th & 19th amendments are affirmations of a right that always existed, but was restricted strictly due to the christian norms of early america. in england, voting rights were tied to property, not to gender and (landholding) women were initially granted the vote strictly due to awkwardness around taxation without representation, that expansion of rights very much coming from changing norms in the highest classes, and, frankly, the alleviation of the period of medieval warfare, where existence was continually dangerous, no small part being due to warfare amongst small landowners being commonplace. as the industrial revolution was underway, workers were flooding into the country as cheap labour. so, one may imagine that the landed farming class might have sought to find ways to increase it's democratic power by assigning each family - an indivisible unit in the christian patriarchy - two votes instead of one. the immigrants, mostly single men, would have one vote. understanding their perspective on this means understanding the centrality that conservative, christian culture played in their lives, as well as the importance of their middle class and, at that time rooted, heritage.
none of this makes the slightest bit of sense in the context of the socialist movement that was happening, centered around the iww.