Jeri Wine and the Feminist Party of Canada

I worked closely with Jeri Wine the Feminist Party of Canada. Founded 1979, the was a high profile, vibrantly successful, visionary challenge to male politics as usual for a few years before succumbing to our failuthe inability to capitalize on the potential this fast growth offered (Carey, 1979; Pawlenko, 1979; Tillotson, 1980). At the time I was teaching courses at Atkinson College, York University while I finished my doctorate at U of T and Jeri was a young faculty member at OISE/UT. As founding members of the Party we both marveled at and welcomed the broad involvement of women from walks of life, levels of education, ages, orientations and political experience. In Toronto, lesbian and straight women, with and without children, single and with partners, from downtown and suburbs, employed and unemployed, on welfare and off, from Toronto and from away, without high school and with PhDs came together the Feminist Party of Canada. While the FPC included politically experienced feminist radicals, its main potential (for both growing numbers and creative challenge to established ways of doing and seeing things) came from the many women who joined with little experience of parliamentary politics and no loyalties to any existing parties or practices. The irreverent and angry women who were new to politics were very clear that the Emperor had no clothes and were not too shy to say so. They were determined to do things differently, to honour different values and behaviour and to make a new world. Jeri was one of the most passionate and active of these, one of the central core of movers and shapers of the Party's politics, culture and spirit. The Feminist Party of Canada worked collectively and democratically, reached out to women, and gave everyone a chance to use and develop skills, to be radical and angry, to have fun, and to question deeply. We (not necessarily this order and generally simultaneously) developed policy; opened an office; partied and built a social life together; organized forums on major policy and issue areas; wrote briefs, position papers, policy documents, manifestos, press releases, speeches, flyers; spoke on TV and radio, to reporters, public meetings, school and work groups, and on doorsteps; researched voting systems and women's parties and feminist political initiatives elsewhere; got the necessary 10,000 signatures to become an official political the Province of Ontario; formed membership committees, education and outreach committees, policy committees, reading and study groups, neighbourhood/riding groups; joined all party panels discussing policy and issues of the day - the FPC's passion, vision, eloquence, honesty, egalitarianism and radicalism contrasting strikingly and refreshingly with the behaviour allowed politicians from other parties. All the while, we debated whether to run candidates and, if so, when and how to do this a way that would re-shape politics rather than re-shape ourselves. We faced the ongoing challenge of figuring out how to change politics while participating it and whether this was really possible. Should we try? Or should our electoral activity prioritize education, movement building, cultural change and challenge rather than getting elected? (Zaborsky, 1987). While there were varying positions on electoral strategy, everyone the Feminist Party of Canada agreed on the central importance of maintaining a high activist profile with such controversial actions as the annual Remembrance Day ceremony at Old City Hall Toronto. Hundreds of women each brought a flower in memory of women who are victims of wars past, present, and future, the world over. Broadside, the Toronto feminist newspaper, reported the words that Mary O'Brien spoke at this event on November 11, 1979: On this day, when we remember the agonies which war brings to the lives of ordinary people, the women of this city remember too the grief, terror, and violence which have always been part of women's experience of war. …

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