...buffer directness. I was intimidated. I was a new feminist, less than five years into that paradigm then. By the end of that class, though, I was hooked on Jeri Wine. I went on to take four more classes from her during my time at OISE, getting first my M.Ed. and then my Ph.D.

The second class I took from Jeri was a course called "Feminist Issues in Counselling and Psychotherapy." As in many courses, the final was a term paper. Mine was called "Feminist Issues as they Relate to My Grandmother, My Mother and Myself." By that time Jeri had infused in me the many different ways of knowing and of learning. She gave her students wide berth to explore our society and our selves and she made the phrase "critical analysis" mean an insightful but hard and necessary look at whatever we were examining. Under her tutelage my mantra became "the personal is political." Another pillar Jeri helped build for me was that theory should arise from experience, and Jeri valued experience. She also valued creativity and she made a safe environment for me to explore feminist issues, from an historical and personal perspective, that I thought related to my grandmother, my mother, and myself. Jeri believed that exploring ourselves was essential to being a good counsellor, exploring others, our society, and our world.

The core of this article is that paper, edited but not essentially changed. Jeri liked it. Writing it meant a lot to me and she recognized that. This paper represents for me one of the ways Jeri was such a fine teacher--she encouraged her students to have disciplined freedom and to really live the personal is political. The letters in the article are all fictitious, based on oral history and pictures and, having read women's history, I embedded the letters in the social texts of their day and I embedded quotes from women's history text into the letters. How generous of Jeri to let me do this. It was not traditionally, stereotypically, academic. Clearly Jeri was comfortable enough in her own identity as an academic to allow her students considerable freedom to explore their own identity.

I must say that as I re-read this paper I cringed in spots. It is not what I would write today. And Jeri must have cringed too, It is unabashedly heterosexist. I was, after all, a mid-30s mother of two small children, married for the second time to an accountant of all things and living in the suburbs. In parts of the paper I talk about relationships between women, between my mother and myself but I brought no analysis to those comments. I didn't locate myself in that world of heterosexism. In my final letter to my daughter, who was 4 at the time, I refer to her turning to other women for sustenance and support, but I said it in a casual way. I didn't know when I wrote this paper that Jeri had been one of the first academics to come out as a lesbian. I didn't know any of what this had cost her professionally and personally. Re-reading what I wrote 22 years ago I now know that Jeri was a very forgiving woman.

There is no reference to racism/anti-racism, an issue in which I was to immerse myself less than two years later and which was the core of my PhD research and thesis and has been one of my main focusses ever since. I wrote, in 1984, from a white, middle class, heterosexist, ethnocentric focus. I didn't talk much about my mother's bigotry. I didn't talk about my own racism. That self-knowledge came later. In spite of all of this, Jeri accepted me for who I was at the time, and encouraged me to dig, really dig, into my assumptions and my behaviours. The paper reproduced here captures the beginning of that self exploration and critical analysis. I think I am a better person, counselor, researcher, teacher, social critic and mother because of Jeri Wine and her teaching.

Introduction [1984]

When I first thought of writing about this topic I felt I had enough material in my own experience to fill a 20 page paper. When I approached Jeri Wine, the instructor, about this title for a paper ("Feminist Issues as they Relate to My Grandmother, My Mother, and Myself") she suggested I put what I had to say in an historical perspective. In the process I see the subject much differently than before. Before, I saw our three lives as an isolated unit, linear in progression and within our own family context. But in reading women's history I see our three lives in the context of something much broader. The first way was linear, as I said; the second way is circular: it has no beginning and no end. Our lives were not the beginning and they were/are not the end. Interspersed were/are the experiences of many others and so there is a matrix of dots within the circle. This experience and insight make my reaction to the topic fuller and richer and more meaningful.

Deciding what issues to discuss in our lives and how to discuss them was stimulated and influenced by the different ways the authors of the women's history books I read presented their material. From traditional chronology, to focussing on individuals, to focussing on issues and finally to focussing on "the female past from within its own consciousness" (1) which means to follow a flow "from the personal to the institutional, from self and family to groups and society, and constitute an attempt at a new ordering of historical categories to make them more appropriate to the experience of women," (2) I was attracted to more than one approach. I have chosen to focus on issues, but the next problem was how to connect these to the experiences of my grandmother and my mother, both of whom are dead. There are few letters, there is the memory of conversations with my mother (my grandmother I never knew), but there are pictures and there is the life that they led. I decided to make contact with them through letters which are in fact fictitious, but are based in historical and personal truths.

What follows is a series of letters which incorporate the issues of marriage, economics, childbearing and child raising, loving, "therapy," and death, all of which are political. These are the threads of most women's lives as discussed by three women, bringing layers of history to the surface and into the present. (In the letters are quotes from outside sources. To preserve the feeling of a letter, I incorporate the quotes as part of the letter but credit them in "Notes" at the end.)

On a broader level they are issues in counselling and psychotherapy because these issues frame our lives and define the context within which we live our lives either as counsellors or psychotherapists or the receivers of same. Understanding ourselves is crucial to understanding others.

My Mother, My Grandmother, and Myself

The time I am going to write about extends from 1900 to today. My grandmother, Sarah Newell Andersen, was born around 1875 to third generation Americans from Swedish descent. I know very little about her before 1904 when my mother, Harriet Unetta, was born. What I do know about her is what I remember from conversations with my mother and from the pictures I have.

Neither my mother nor my grandmother was a feminist. They lived traditional lives: childhood with mother and father, courting and then marriage, childbearing and then mothering, the independent adult years and, finally, death. As far as I know they were never involved in any social cause outside their own family interests.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

From the pictures, it appears that my grandmother came from an extended family, all of whose members appear in group pictures from time to time. After her marriage to my grandfather, Otto Anderson, my mother was born. At that time they lived on a farm outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, where my grandfather was the cook for the farm hands. The...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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