11 Facts About Sarah Dickenson

Sarah Dickenson OBE was a British trade unionist and feminist activist.

Sarah Dickenson left employment in the mill that year, devoting her time initially to the trades council and another new local organisation, the Federation of Women Workers, then from 1899 as secretary of the Manchester and Salford Association of Machine, Electrical and other Women Workers.

Around 1900, Dickenson joined the North of England Society for Women's Suffrage, a body linked with the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.

Sarah Dickenson served on its executive, addressed many meetings on the subject of women's suffrage, and took a leading part in promoting a petition of women factory workers, which she jointly presented to Parliament in 1901 when it had around 30,000 signatures.

In 1903, Sarah Dickenson was a leading founder of the rival Lancashire and Cheshire Women Textile and Other Workers' Representation Committee, which was committed to women's suffrage from the start, and she resigned from the WTUC the following year, instead joining the new Manchester and Salford Women's Trades and Labour Council.

Sarah Dickenson was active in the NUWSS and sometimes took work as a paid organiser for the group.

Sarah Dickenson worked with Mary Macarthur to organise a National Union of Women Workers conference in Manchester in 1907.

Sarah Dickenson opposed World War I, and was a delegate to the Women's International Conference on Peace at The Hague, although she was unable to travel to it, due to wartime restrictions.

Sarah Dickenson campaigned for the government's wartime maximum wage for women to be raised, something which occurred in 1915.

In 1918, the WLTC and WTUC both merged into the Manchester and Salford Trades Council, and from 1920, Sarah Dickenson was secretary to its Women's Group.

Sarah Dickenson largely retired from the trade union movement in 1930, serving as a magistrate until 1939.