A MUSEUM in Salford is ‘thrilled’ to have acquired a rare newspaper collection linked to Sylvia Pankhurst collection at auction.

Salford’s Working Class Movement Library has acquired a bound volume of the weekly newspaper The Woman’s Dreadnought, following a grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The library on The Crescent now owns a copy of the newspaper, covering March 1915 to March 1916, which detailed a wide range of topics of interest to working women.

Library manager Lynette Cawthra said:'”We are thrilled to have been fortunate enough to be able to purchase such a great treasure linked to the fight for women’s suffrage and specifically to Sylvia Pankhurst, as part of our National Lottery Heritage Fund project Voting for Change’.”

Image credit: Working Class Movement Library.

“We believe that in these turbulent times such history has never been more relevant, and we want as many people as possible to know about and use the Library. We need to find £80,000 each year to keep the Library going“.

The 1915-16 volume has a strong focus on protests about the First World War, including details of anti-conscription meetings and an article on “The fraud of equal pay” for women working in munitions factories.

Sylvia Pankhurst contributed articles on subjects from “Death rates of mothers” to “Stand by the woman worker”, with many references to women’s suffrage.

Kate Connelly, a Sylvia Pankhurst biographer, will be coming to the library on Saturday 30 March to give a talk on the suffragette whilst the volume is displayed.

She explained:”The Dreadnought, which ran for ten years, printed articles by campaigners in the feminist, socialist, anti-war and revolutionary movements of the time, and was considered so dangerous by the authorities that its offices were subject to several police raids.”

The Working Class Movement Library collection contains books, pamphlets, personal archives, photographs and more. They tell the story of Britain’s working classes from the earliest days of industrialization to the present day.

The website also offers a way to find out more about this unique collection – see here for details.

The Library is open to the public on Wednesday,Thursday and Friday afternoons. At other times visitors are welcome to make appointments to view or use the collection.

The Working Class Movement Library is a charitable trust, and is recognised as one of Britain’s most important collections of working class history.

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