Sarah Dickenson

Sarah Dickenson OBE (28 March 1868 – 26 December 1954) was a British trade unionist and feminist activist.

Early life Born in Hulme in Manchester as Sarah Welsh, Dickenson left school at the age of eleven to work in a cotton mill, where she became interested in trade unionism.

Activism In 1895, she was appointed as joint organizing secretary of the new Manchester and Salford Women's Trade Union Council (WTUC). She 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 (of which she was secretary from about 1904),

Around 1900, Dickenson joined the North of England Society for Women's Suffrage (NESWS), a body linked with the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). She 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. She died in 1954.