Celebrating the "Feminist-as-Lesbian": Jeri Dawn Wine

When Jeri Wine was chair of Department of Applied Psychology at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 1980s, nameplate on her office door stated unequivocally, Jeri Wine, Chairwoman. This was at a time when many feminists, particularly liberal feminists, saw gender-neutral language as a key concern for women's movement. Instead of gender-biased terms like policeman, or gendered words like policewoman, chairperson and police officer were preferred terms. Jeri's designation of chairwoman served as a reminder to a predominantly male department and a university where men held most of administrative posts, that this department was chaired by a woman. And this chairwoman was both feminist and openly lesbian, a particularly rare combination in 1980s. I was reminded of this when I read opening sentence of Jeri's 1982 work on Gynocentric Values and Psychology, where she wrote: Feminist perspectives in psychology are slowly emerging, a process that is a painful and controversial one, but one that is beginning to provide important ovarian theory and data for broader feminist struggle (Wine, 1982, p. 68, emphasis added). The reader can trace Jeri's implicit rejection of jarring masculinist word seminal, followed by her avoidance of a gender-neutral alternative like pioneering, and finally, her conscious choice of a coined gynocentric word, ovarian, a term entirely compatible with gynocentric values that were focus of her paper. I knew Jeri as a feminist colleague at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education from 1979 until her departure, through her participation in Centre for Women's Studies in Education and journal, Resources for Research, and as a sister activist and member of Party of Canada. Unfortunately, as a graduate student in OISE's Department Sociology in Education (1979-83), I didn't take any of her courses, but I had a number of friends and acquaintances who did so in late 1980s. In following reflections, I'm drawing on some of their memories and anecdotes, as well as on my own. First of all, some historical background is needed to understand what women's studies professors, students and classes at OISE looked like in 1980s. Although OISE was one of Canada's pioneers in women's studies, like all university-based programs it was housed in, and constrained by, a male-dominated bureaucracy. Jen's 1990 article, Outsiders on Inside: Lesbians in Canadian Academe, based on interviews with lesbian university instructors and students, mostly from Ontario, in 1985-86, clearly documented chilly climate experienced by sexual minorities in academy, with women's studies courses providing one of few safe places on campus. Two participants noted that openly gay male professors had not produced supportive classroom environments for lesbian students. Overall, Jeri found that the almost seamless heterosexist assumptions permeating academic knowledge (p. 158) at that time entrenched silence and invisibility of lesbian existence. On a positive note, she correctly predicted that growth of feminist studies would provide an academic home for lesbian and woman-identified scholarship. In 1986, when I began teaching at OISE, very few male students enrolled in women's studies courses. One whom I remember from a sociology course was a counsellor in a program for abusive men, and was working with Jeri on his degree in community psychology. I was surprised when a female student told me that she viewed this man's behaviour as harassing. She said she planned to confront him in class about this problem, and proceeded to do so, despite my efforts to persuade her to resolve matter in private. What ensued was an hour of tense exchanges, primarily between these two students, followed by an hour I spent with male student to process what had happened. Despite my novice instructor status, I felt that I had well-developed fraud detectors when it came to men who called themselves profeminist, and my impressions of this man didn't match those of female student. …

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