Women Against Slavery

The 25th of March 2007 marked 200 years to the day that a Parliamentary Act was passed to abolish the slave trade in the British colonies.

In order to commemorate this year’s Bicentenary, an Exhibition and a series of workshops was held at the Women’s Electronic Village Hall in Manchester.

For almost twenty years before the 1807 Act, the people of Manchester had been showing their opposition to slavery, despite the majority of jobs in the city being dependent upon cotton produced by slave labour. In 1788 over ten thousand people, almost one in five of the population, signed a petition against slavery and a second petition in 1792 was signed by twenty thousand people.

This exhibition, with a special focus on the 19th century anti-slavery campaign, aimed to encourage visitors to find out more about the slave trade and its abolition and to raise awareness on the wealth and diversity of resources available online.

During the exhibition, we ran four free workshops in which the participants did online research into the lives of some of the women who were touched by slavery and the networks that they formed (which can be seen here on The Internet Trail page). They also learnt how to create easy to use, free websites for their own present day networks.

You can find out more about the exhibition and workshops using the links at the top of this page. And on the side of this page you will see links to some of the resources which we used during the exhibition, including a diary of other commemorative events taking place in Manchester.

We would like to thank the following individuals and organisations for their support:-

Jo O’Connor - from the BBC for her article ‘Sufferage and Slavery’ and for linking this site to the BBC’s online service

Barbara Brayshay - Chair of the Women’s Electronic Village Hall for introducing the launch of the exhibition.

Sara Burnham - for the creation of the website 

Baigal Gongor - for preparing the room and buffet

Dominique Tessier - for organising the exhibition

Martine Tommis - for organising the workshops as part of the work done byManchester Digital Development Agency

Soloman - for running the reception during the exhibition launch

…and finally to all the women who took part in the workshops and the online trail…  thank you!