Beyond the Big Divide? the Humanities and Social Sciences in Women's Studies

Jeri Wine was an activist, a teacher, a scholar, and a therapist. She was an extremely important mentor to me as a lesbian, a feminist, and as a professor in Community at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). I very much wanted to pay tribute to Jeri as a way of expressing my gratitude for all that she did for me, and many of the former students and colleagues of Jeri's who I approached to contribute to this special issue felt the same way--they owed her something because of all that she had done for them when they were students and in their careers. Jeri was a pioneer in the fields of lesbian studies, community psychology and women's mental health issues, and feminist organizing for change. She wrote many important and often ground breaking scholarly articles (a few of which are reprinted in this issue). She was a professor at OISE from 1975 to 1992 in Counselling and Community and Feminist Studies. She was chair of the Department of for three years, served as president of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) and the Canadian Women's Studies Association (CWSA), was active in the Centre for Women's Studies in Education (CWSE) at OISE and served on the editorial board of Resources for Feminist Research (RFR). In the community, she was a member of the Feminist Party of and a member of Women Against Violence Against Women. Jeri left OISE and academe in an effort to regain her health after having suffered for many years with health issues that seemed to be the result of the sick building on Bloor St. that housed OISE (in this collection both Paula Caplan and Kathleen Rockhill, who were colleagues of Jeri's, speak directly about the controversies over the safety of the building and the impact on their own health). Jeri moved to Charlottetown and later to Halifax where she had an active psychotherapy practice and where she continued to work on issues of social justice through her involvement with the Raging Grannies in Halifax. She died too young, in 2004, at the age 66, as a result of a disease finally diagnosed as mesothelioma, an asbestos-related cancer that is 100% environmentally induced and that takes 20 to 30 years to develop. We begin this special issue by reprinting three of Jeri's articles. They indicate the breadth of her scholarly work, show her unrelenting commitment to activism, and reveal the ways she helped lay the groundwork for feminist studies. In 1983 Jeri published Academics in Canada as part of an RFR special issue simply, yet oh so powerfully and provocatively, called Lesbian Issue. Jeri was part of the collective that produced the special issue and they had hoped it would serve as a resource for the development of lesbian studies courses. In her article she reports on her interviews with six other lesbian academics about their experiences in academia. What emerges is a description of the complex and muitilayered process involved in coming out and being out in a heterosexist environment. The article was groundbreaking, appearing as it did less than 10 years after homosexuality was finally removed from the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association. What is surprising, despite all the important victories and advances made in same-sex rights, is that the article still resonates. Gynocentric Values and Feminist Psychology was published in 1989 as part of a collection called Feminism: From Pressure to Politics, edited by Angela Miles and Geraldine Finn. In this article Jeri takes on the male-stream field of psychology and calls for a 'gynocentric relationality perspective to replace the androcentic and individualistic models that dominate and define the field of psychology. As Marina Morrow commented in this collection on her experiences as a student in the field of psychology where the teachings seemed far removed from the actual lives and experiences of women: Several distinct memories come to mind: a social psychology class where we are told that men experience more violence and crime than women and where the subject of intimate violence is never broached; a class on clinical psychology where sex and race differences related to psychiatric diagnosis are never mentioned much less interrogated for their meanings; a class on the history of psychology where Freud's sexist ideas about women's bodies and sexuality are presented as 'quaint' and 'outmoded' but never discussed in relation to the unwitting legacy he left regarding the massive denial of the role that childhood sexual abuse plays in the lives of women. …

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