Feminist Conversations is a new feature at Feminist For Choice. We are sitting down and to chat with fellow activists to find out what kind of rabble they’re rousing in their neck of the woods.Peggy Cooke is a Canadian pro-choice activist. She works as the volunteer coordinator/office assistant at the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and volunteers as a media spokesperson for the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. In her spare time she enjoys feminist gumboot dancing, cuddling with cats, and tearing down the patriarchy. She regularly blogs at Anti-Choice is Anti-Awesome. I caught up with her over the weekend to ask her a few questions about what feminist activism means to her.

1. When did you first call yourself a feminist, and what influenced that decision?
I like to say I was raised feminist. I honestly don’t remember when the word first entered my day-to-day vocabulary, and I had no “a-ha!” moment where I said, yes, I am a feminist. My mother is a feminist and she models that worldview in everything she does. I basically just followed her lead without realizing that it isn’t an outlook that everyone gets in childhood.

Eventually of course I started developing a feminist lens of my own, and my mum and I don’t always see eye to eye on some of the standard stuff that I think divides a lot of second and third wave feminists. Like trans issues, intersectionality, and all that. Not that she isn’t open to it, but it’s a whole educating/passing the torch process. My mum started me on the feminist path, but then my influences were mainly women’s studies classes, and now it is feminist blogs, in a big way. I didn’t know what privilege was, or intersectionality, or how to be an ally, until I started reading blogs. [Read more...]