That's No Lady

The story of the Sheffield Co-op begins in the late 1960s, with the first stirrings of second wave feminist organising in Sheffield. A small group of women with young children of the city realised that film could be a powerful means of giving women the voice that they did not have in the mainstream media. With funding from Channel 4's Independent Film and Video Department, the Sheffield Co-op went on to make films for broadcast and to help train new women filmmakers in order to fight against an overwhelmingly male-dominated film industry. The Co-op’s boom lasted almost a decade, during which the group made increasingly ambitious productions exploring such diverse topics as: abortion in response to a parliamentary bill which threatened to restrict access in the UK; child poverty in Thatcher’s Britain; or gay Olympians and Sheffield’s “buffer girls”. They were one of the UK’s most important and active film collectives of the period.