Lee Lakeman

I interviewed Lakeman at her home in Vancouver. She grew up in a white, working-class family in Hamilton, Ontario, and was first drawn into the women’s liberation movement during her time living in the small central Ontario city of Woodstock in the early 1970s. She played a central role in the founding of a women’s shelter there. Later in the ’70s, she moved out to Vancouver and got a position in the Vancouver Rape Relief collective, where she has been an active and often controversial figure in the Canadian women’s movement (particularly the strand working against male violence) ever since. Her stories are featured in Chapter 3 of Gender and Sexuality: Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists.

Material from Lakeman on this site:

• An audio clip of Lakeman talking about a women’s movement conference that brough together a hundred grassroots women from Woodstock and elsewhere in Oxford County in the early 1970s.

  [audio:lakeman_conference.mp3]
  

• An audio clip of her memories of and reflections on Take Back the Night.