Jess: Thanks for agreeing to meet with me today. As a young feminist I’m wondering how you became involved in the feminist movement and how you decided to make it your life’s work.

Lee: In a way, I had absolutely no excuse. I was roughly twenty, living in Toronto and studying at Ryerson, so lots of things were going on all around me, including meetings about women’s liberation and meetings about the civil rights movement. It was right there. You had to work atnot being involved when I was young.

reblogged with thanks from: http://www.feministcurrent.com/…-interview-with-lee-lakeman/

To top it all off, I became pregnant by a foreign student so I was, all of a sudden, right in the middle of the race questions, poverty questions, and women’s rights questions. That made them all profoundly important to me. I didn’t think about it as my life’s work until later.

I owned a house with some friends, and we made it available to women who had no place to go. It became the Woodstock Women’s Emergency shelter. So, there I was in the middle of learning about violence against women, and I haven’t looked back. The work is rewarding, and the more I did it, the more I understood how important it was. It was a place to stand. Continue reading “Lee Lakeman: Lifelong Feminist Activist”