Display celebrates city links to feminist movement

An exhibition exploring feminist history, including work by actors Dame Maureen Lipman and Meera Syal, has opened at the University of Leeds.

Animated Activism: Women Empowered will run throughout 2025 telling the stories of two organisations that grew out of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s - Women's Aid and Leeds Animation Workshop.

The exhibition includes items from the organisations' archives, which are both held in the university's cultural collections.

Nikki Bradley, director of services at Women's Aid, said the exhibition was part of the charity's 50th anniversary celebrations.

She said: "The exhibition gives us the opportunity to look back at the incredible work of our organisation over the last half a century and reflect on just how far we've come."

Alongside Women's Aid, the display also celebrates the work of Harehills-based Leeds Animation Workshop.

The workshop was established in 1976 when a small group of women in Leeds came together to make a film about the need for pre-school childcare called Who Needs Nurseries? - We Do.

In 1982, with a grant from the British Film Institute, it bought a house in Harehills where it is still based today.

The group produces and distributes films on a range of social and educational issues including racism, homophobia and the environmental crisis.

Its films have been narrated by Alan Bennett, Sir Lenny Henry, Michael Rosen, Dame Maureen Lipman and Meera Syal.

As part of the university's exhibition, a newly commissioned short film - made with support from the Wellcome Trust - will explore the histories of both organisations, and how their archives came to be at Leeds.

Exhibits on show will also include newsletters, badges, posters, photographs and animation cels.

Terry Wragg, worker-director and a founder member of Leeds Animation Workshop, said the organisation had donated its collection to the university "so that, in the future, nobody will be able to tell young women from Yorkshire they can't make animated films".

She said: "When many of us were young, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, they told us women couldn't be artists or animators.

"A woman, if she was extremely lucky, might be allowed to trace and paint some of the men's drawings; or perhaps be secretary to a director.

"And if you were living in the North there would be no chance at all."

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North or tell us a story you think we should be covering here.