Peggy Antrobus

Peggy Antrobus (born 1935) is a feminist activist, author, and scholar from the Caribbean. She worked as Advisor on Women's Affairs to the government of Jamaica, and as United Nations advisor to the Barbados Ministry of Social Transformation. She is one of the early members of several feminist organisations, like Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA), the global South feminist network Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), and the International Gender and Trade Network (IGTN). She is the author of The Global Women's Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies (Zed Books, 2004).

Childhood and education

Antrobus was born in Grenada in 1935. She studied in St. Lucia at St. Joseph's Convent and later at the St. Vincent Girl's High School. She studied economics at Bristol University in 1954, and got a certificate in social work at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She completed her doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1998.

Career

Antrobus was appointed the advisor on Women's Affairs to the government of Jamaica in 1974. According to Michelle Rowley, associate professor of women's studies at the University of Maryland, this was the beginning of Antrobus' feminist consciousness. In 1987, she started the Women and Development Unit (WAND) at the University of the West Indies (UWI) and was its manager until she retired in 1995.

She started the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA) with other Caribbean activists, artists, and scholars like Honor Ford-Smith, Sonia Cuales, Cynthia Ellis, Joan French, Rhoda Reddock, and Rawwida Baksh-Soodeen in 1985. She was also a starter of Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN) and functioned as the organization's general coordinator for the from 1990 to 1996.

With many other important activists, Peggy Antrobus was interested in the UN World Conferences on Women, including the first at Mexico City in 1975. US feminist and author Charlotte Bunch, quotes Antrobus as saying, about this first international gathering of women: "It was within this context that women from around the world first encountered each other in a sustained and ever-deepening process....[that] was to nurture and expand this movement in a way that not even its strongest protagonists could have imagined."

Writing

Peggy Antrobus writes an analytical and historical summary of global feminism and the international women's movement in her book, The Global Women's Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies (Zed Books, 2004). She contributed an essay to Robin Morgan's anthology, Sisterhood is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984).