According to Michelle Rowley, associate professor of women's studies at the University of Maryland, this was the beginning of Antrobus' feminist consciousness.

[8] In 1987, she set up the Women and Development Unit (WAND) at the University of the West Indies (UWI) and was its head until she retired in 1995.

[2] With other Caribbean activists, artists, and scholars like Honor Ford-Smith, Sonia Cuales, Cynthia Ellis, Joan French, Rhoda Reddock, and Rawwida Baksh-Soodeen, Antrobus set up the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA), in 1985.

[9] She was also a founder member of Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN) and functioned as the organization's general coordinator for the from 1990 to 1996.

US feminist and author Charlotte Bunch, quotes Antrobus as saying, about this inaugural 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.