Revisiting and reflecting on a piece written for Jeri Wine in 1984: "Feminist issues as they relate to my grandmother, my mother, and myself".

Gerrard, Nikki

Preface

I had my first course from Jeff Wine at OISE in 1984, 23 years ago. When she strode into the room with her long curly hair barely contained around her face I thought, "Who is this?" She was small, she was intense, she brooked no nonsense, and her Oklahoma accent did little to buffer her 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.

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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 farm was owned by a wealthy Minneapolitan. It does not appear that my grandmother worked with him and I presume her main job was to keep house and look after my mother and her adopted sister, Ethel.

Though my mother went through all the traditional life stages I mentioned above, there were some odd years in her life. She did not marry young; in fact she was 39 when she did marry for the first time. Prior to that she had spent the intervening years between high school graduation and marriage first going to teacher's college, then going into nursing. Somewhere in there she and her mother (after my grandfather's death) got jobs together as cooks and housecleaners in wealthy homes, first in California and then in Minnesota. Between 1929, when my grandmother died, and 1944, when my mother married, she became an alcoholic. It is these years she was always so ashamed of as she once told me just before an appointment with a psychiatrist in 1971, "There are things in my life I would rather forget and I don't ever want you to know about. I just don't want the psychiatrist to rake them all up."

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I was born when my mother was 42. She had married my father three years previously and my brother, George, was born two years before I. She had met my father at Alcoholics Anonymous. My impression is that he was a "ne'er do well" and when I was born he was 59 and had very little to show for his life's labours. He died when I was 1 1/2 years old and my penniless mother raised my brother and myself alone. During those years she went from being destitute and on welfare to being an elementary school teacher, having received her degree over a period of eight to ten years, graduating in 1961 at the age of 57. She died in 1976 having lived the last six years of her life as a non-fully-functioning person after receiving electric shock treatments for depression in 1970.

My earliest memories are of my mother with grey hair and a bent back (she suffered from slipped discs, undiagnosed, for ten years) who walked with a cane and who everyone assumed was my grandmother. I was ten when we left the inner city of Minneapolis (one step ahead of the authorities who were hot on the trail of my brother and myself who were quickly developing into accomplished juvenile delinquents) and moved to a small town in northern Minnesota where my mother took up her first full time job since I was born, as a teacher. She lived in that small town for the next 13 years.

I was to leave home at age sixteen to attend university 60 miles away. I graduated from university when I was 20 and married soon after. There were two relatively peaceful years and then, at age 65 my mother was forced to retire from teaching. She became depressed, had electric shock treatments and became non-functional. I was 23.

My husband was a paleontologist and, while working at a summer job the third year of our marriage, fell in love with someone else. He wanted the three of us to live together but I opted out of that arrangement and left him when I was 24. The next two years were spent trying to restore my mother to health, accepting defeat in that area, getting divorced and remarrying. My mother died when I was 29. That ended the era of my twenties, a tumultuous and difficult decade.

At the age of 30 my second husband, Peter, and I moved to Nairobi, Kenya, for two years. After two miscarriages in Kenya I became pregnant just before arriving home in Canada. My thirties was one of childbearing, child raising and going back to school.

Encouraged by my mother to become self-sufficient (so as never to be in the position she was in when my father died) I had never consciously felt the "original sin of being born female." (3) I had my university degree at 20 and had ten years of a career before I "retired" to have children. It wasn't until I was a mother at age 33 that I felt the oppression against my sex and became a feminist. With this background, then, I begin the discussion of the issues I presented in my introduction.

Marriage, Economics and Transition

Dear Grandmother,

I know you never met me but I am Harriet's daughter. There is very little I know about you except for what Morn told me and what I have seen for myself in the pictures of you that I have. But l am trying to examine parts of your life (which in some respects were really issues) in the context of other women who were contemporaries of yours. I think many of these issues were intertwined and really affected each other--for instance marriage and economics were connected, as they are to a great extent today.

I would like you to discuss your marriage because morn told me that it wasn't exactly as I would have guessed. According to what mom told me you didn't love my grandfather. Is that true? And if so, then why did you marry him?

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Love, Nikki

Dear Nikki,

I am so pleased that you have thought to write to me after all these years. I have always longed to communicate with you. I would be glad to answer your questions.

Yes, I married your grandfather without loving him. It helps to know in what context I did that at the turn of the century. "For American women ... marriage was their most important occupation.... It was always difficult for an independent woman to earn a living sufficient for self-support." (4) Otto had good training as a baker and when I married him he was working in a bakery.

Later, when we moved to Woodend Farm, I was very comfortable in those beautiful surroundings. In addition I wanted to leave home but there were no other opportunities to do so. "Nineteenth century marriage meant childbirth which meant domesticity, whereas failing to marry meant a lonely life." (5)

As for feelings, it was (and, perhaps, is) not unusual to at least feel ambiguous about marriage. I once read a letter written by Harriet Beecher (later to be Stowe) to her friend Georgiana, on the eve of her (Harriet's) marriage, "'Well. my dear G., about half an hour more and your old friend, and companion, school mate, sister, etc., will cease to be Hatty Beecher, and change to nobody knows who.... I have been dreading and dreading the time, and lying awake all last week wondering how I should live through this overwhelming crisis, and lo! it has come, and I feel nothing at all.'" (6) My own mother felt ambiguous about marriage as she was 25 years younger than my father. Look at her pictures. Do they look like a loving couple to you?

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So, for me, marriage provided economic security and separation from my parents. In addition it meant I could have children and I had your lovely mother whom I was very close to as you can see in the pictures. Loving Otto was not necessary for me to marry him. Do you understand now?

I understand that you have been married twice. Could you tell me about that? I look forward to hearing from you again.

Love, Grandmother

Dear Grandmother,

Thank you for writing. I appreciate your comments about marriage and I would be happy to tell you about why I married, what part my mother played in it, what my expectations were, and how I feel about marriage today.

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I can remember walking down the aisle (which was really a hill outside) to marry Donald when I was just 21 and thinking all the way, "This is a mistake". I didn't feel ready for marriage and I didn't have very much faith in Donald as someone who could or would meet my needs. But I also felt that this was the inevitable next step in a relationship which had gone on for two years. Mom was neither for nor against my marrying; partly I think her apparent lack of opinion was due to two things--first was the incessant pain she was in as a result of her last slipped disc operation after which her spine got infected and she got those abscesses Secondly, I think Mom saw marriage as an inevitable step in a woman's life. I don't think she really saw that step as an enlightening one, but rather as unavoidable. For that reason she was not joyous about the event but resigned. Perhaps that should have been something we could have explored together but I also was feeling the need to separate from her and may not have listened to her anyway.

As for me, I just never questioned it. Marriage was inevitable in the way I saw life too. Having just gotten my degree I didn't feel any economic pressure to marry--in fact I am the one who supported us throughout the entire marriage. And though I was not living at home I did feel very tied to mom and I know she depended on me tremendously for her emotional and social needs. I thought that marriage would magically remove those demands from me. I must also say that I married because of my desire to help yet another person reach his potential--in other words to be a helpmate. In return for all this giving I had certain expectations in return.

In return for my freedom as a daughter (which never came, by the way), my giving and economic support, I expected to become interlocked with this male who would carry me on his coattail to the pinnacle of life! I am not being facetious. Donald was extremely intelligent and I could see him being a professor in which case I would be the professor's wife. Socially we would glide through the world which is designed for heterosexual couples. Intellectually I would have a companion who would stimulate me. I would have, then, companionship, stimulation, and social benefits; I thought caring and security would be a matter of course.

In our marriage ceremony we had written, "We are investing what we are in the potential of what we can become." In truth it should have read, "We are investing what we are in the potential of what Donald can become." I was like Dora Russell in her early married life with Bertrand which Dale Spender writes about: "It was but a few years since Dora had envisaged for herself a life of liberty and love and she found herself instead sharing the common and traditional fate of many women--she was an 'interrupted' wife and mother who sincerely wanted to meet the needs of those whom she loved but who found that they could only be fulfilled at the expense of meeting her own." (7)

The end of my marriage came about because of a love affair Donald had with another woman, and I took my opportunity to run away from that marriage.

In the period between Donald and my second husband, Peter, I decided what it was that I would change if I ever decided to pair up with a man again. First came the consideration of whether I wanted to pair up again. I was not a "man junkie" as Gloria Steinem calls it and I settled into a life that was very satisfactory for me. But somehow I could not completely shake the idea that I could only fulfill my own potential through another person. That, combined with the need for companionship, led me into marriage again but with a different awareness and expectation.

I had a firm idea in my head about my rights as a person, my main right being the right to a full and independent adult life. I was also aware of my vulnerability, as a woman, to having my life compromised by the necessities of life, more so than a man. The protection of myself in relation to that vulnerability has been a process and a goal in this marriage. Like Dora Russell, I try to " ... organize society so that women can be mothers, lovers, nurturers--and also lead active and meaningful lives in a public sense." (8)

Today I see marriage as a precarious choice for women; I don't think I've ever known a woman to get more than she gave in marriage. There is companionship (of greater or lesser quality) but financial security is fickle, and fulfillment does not come through the man. I tell my daughter Sarah, who is four, that she may or may not choose to get married and as she gets older I will tell her, at deeper levels, the implications of each choice. Of course she has her own progressive ideas. Recently she said to me, "Mommy, I want to be a mommy just like you--but I don't want any kids." Along the same line, maybe she can be a wife but without any husband!

I notice I've made some assumptions about what Mom thought about marriage. I'll write to her and ask her what, indeed, she did think about it and I'll include her response here. Until next time, grandma,

Love, Nikki

Dear Nik,

I am glad to get another letter from you and to have the opportunity to discuss with you some of the issues I never had a chance to discuss before I died. You asked me about marriage and since you showed me my mother's letter and your own to her, I will fill in the intervening years and then explain about marriage.

Remember that I am between the two of you--I was the first woman in my family to become educated. I was the first woman to have a career. I was the first woman to work outside my home and receive pay for it.

I had one foot in a life of possible economic independence and the other foot in traditional life. The strains of the role conflicts were tremendous. When my father died my mother was economically unprepared for any livelihood. While 1 was teaching in a small town where she did not live, and supporting her, I longed for her companionship and she for mine. Life in the small town where I could find work would have been as devastatingly lonely for her as it was for me. We finally came upon the idea of teaming up as cook and housecleaner. This we did for a few years. It served Mother's needs but my own were frustrated. The economic independence and stimulation that went along with a career were very appealing to me. I don't think I was alone in this. In fact this whole transition is written about in books like A Heritage of Her Own which examine piece by piece, areas of women's lives in America from the time the pilgrims landed.

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My mother's death in 1929 left a great void in my life. Even though I had the knowledge of a possibility of a different place in the world for me, separate from a traditional home, I was in great conflict. Whichever way I chose seemed to exclude me from the benefits of the other. I felt as if I was on the edge of one era, going into another. I had no support system to nurture me through the transition. And there were other problems: "Formally, the American system promised equality; in actuality, women were faced with discrimination and painful role conflicts." (9) The discrimination, the loneliness and the confusion along with the ensuing economic depression led me into an abyss where alcoholism engulfed me.

The turning point in my own malaise was the war. I found work in an ammunitions plant and earned good money. I joined Alcoholics Anonymous and I met your father there.

It is ironic to me that out of such an awful thing as war I found temporary happiness. I was happy because I truly loved your father. There was no economic necessity to marry. I had been separate and independent from my own family for many years. The main reasons I married were for companionship and to have children. And in those days it was inevitable that to acquire those goals, one married. One year after our marriage your brother was born. Less than two years after that, you were born. But my happy bliss was a thing of the past. Within 2 years after my marriage, we were bankrupt. Of course I had had to quit work because of the babies. And the war came to an end anyway so I, like millions of other women, was out of a job. Economically I was worse off than I had ever been.

The companionship I had sought in marrying was gone as you kids took up all my time and energy. George left all the parenting to me and even insisted I walk the babies in the middle of the night if you fussed so as to not wake him up.

Four years after 1 married, George died and so I had no more companionship. After he died I realized that what I had gotten out of marriage were two kids. And I was penniless. Is it any wonder, then, that I was not joyous about your marriage? I was resigned, as you said, because I had never known any alternative to marriage as a means to have children and I knew that marriage was not the bearer of happiness everyone thought it was. In my own family, I had never seen a happy, loving couple. The marriage between my mother and father had been a loveless one, one of economic necessity and a means to have children. My own marriage developed into an economic and emotional struggle.

I hope this letter was a bridge between my mother and you and that you could compare and contrast the issues involved in marriage for the three of us. Hoping, knowing and looking forward to hearing from you again I remain,

Your loving mother

Loving

Dear Mom,

Thanks so much for your letter. Isn't it interesting to see how our lives have been similar and different, how other women have shared our experiences and how we have affected each other? For you, a career was a first; for me, it was a given. Grandmother married out of economic necessity; that was not true for either of us. But none of us experienced parents who had either survived together in our childhood or, if they had survived, who loved each other. And we all thought marriage was inevitable and we all produced children within the marriages.

Another interesting part of our lives that I would like to examine and get your perspective on is in the area of loving each other. In reading some women's history ! was intrigued by the accounts of how deeply and frequently women loved each other and expressed it. These were women friends, mothers and daughters. Examples of letters between females from the mid-nineteenth century show intense physical and emotional feelings. Here is an example of what two women wrote to each other: "'I shall be entirely alone [this coming week]. I can give you no idea how desperately ! shall want you.' 'Dear darling Sarah! How I love you & how happy I have been! You are the joy of my life .... I cannot tell you how much happiness you gave me, nor how constantly it is all in my thoughts .... My darling how I long for the time when I shall see you. " (10)

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The closeness began with mothers and daughters. "An intimate mother-daughter relationship lay at the heart of this female world. The diaries and letters of both mothers and daughters attest to their closeness and mutual emotional dependency." (11) Looking at the marriages of this period, the period during which Grandmother was married, we get a new perspective: "Of perhaps equal significance are the implications we can garner from this framework for the understanding of heterosexual marriages in the nineteenth century. If men and women grew up as they did in relatively homogeneous and segregated sexual groups, then marriage represented a major problem in adjustment. From this perspective we could interpret much of the emotional stiffness and distance that we associate with Victorian marriage as a structural consequence of contemporary sex-role differentiation and gender-role socialization. With marriage, both women and men had to adjust to life with a person who was, in essence, a member of an alien group." (12) Do you think, Mom, that this partly accounts for the loveless marriage of your mother and father?

I also wonder if you, who then lived through the emergence of Freud's theories which said that same-sex relationships indicated homosexuality, felt guilt and anxiety about your own relationship with your mother. I gather from your stories and the pictures that you and your mother were very close.

I also wonder what your feelings were in regard to me. I always sensed a tension in your relationship with me. Like you wanted to be close but not too close. I remember how you used to come in and help me bathe and then suddenly, one day, I felt that was taboo. The nightly rub, except for my back or feet was a tentative and tense experience in my teen years. I know that by the age of 14 1 had a strong aversion to same-sex alliances. Masculine-looking women disgusted me and my worst fear was that they might show warmth toward me or approach me. Where did I get that? I think it was from you.

When I read historical accounts of how women used to love and express that love to other women I realize that we are products of our societal norms, largely determined by men. What is right and what is wrong? Sometimes it is hard to tell.

I remember wanting to give you a rub once in a while but how strange I felt touching your body. Those times that I did rub you, you seemed to appreciate it. How unfortunate that you didn't ask for physical touch more and I didn't feel comfortable giving it more.

What do you have to say about all this?

Love, Nik

Dear Nik,

I am somewhat astonished by the frankness you use in your discussion of love, especially between women, i never had a chance to read or talk about these things with anyone. In my day, one would never discuss such things.

If I do look back i think I could honestly say my reactions to my mother and to you were like this: My mother and I were extremely close--what you wrote as examples from women's history accounts, 1 would and did write to my mother. Around the time I was in my mid-twenties it became less and less acceptable to feel that way toward other women. And so I did feel guilt and anxiety about my relationship with my mother. When you came along I could relive some of those warm physical experiences but as you grew up I felt it was my duty to distance myself, and yet the desire for physical contact was great. I felt confused about what I should do and I also resented the fact that such pleasurable experiences were denied to me. Perhaps that is where the tension that you mentioned came from. I hope that in your relationships with Sarah and other women you will allow yourself to indulge in physical closeness. Those women of earlier times were freer than we are today and the benefit was theirs!

What did your grandmother have to say about this?

Love, Mom

Dear Mom,

Grandma was not very forthcoming about this but she did write the following:

"At the turn of the century and for the next thirty years I felt emotionally very attached to Harriet, even when she was very young. We did not have much physical contact but emotionally we were every bit as attached to each other as the examples you wrote about. I never experienced the anxiety or guilt that Harriet did--I didn't know enough about the latest theories to make me feel guilty!"

I want to take a look at some new issues now, Mom. Childbearing and child raising were different in all three of our lives. Grandma has written me about what it was like for her in the letter that follows. What was it like for you?

Love, Nik

Childbearing and Child Raising

Dear Nikki,

You do like to discuss the strangest things! Not that they are so strange, really. It's just that folks never discussed them in my day.

Like most women, I became pregnant shortly after I was married. There was no such thing as birth control in those days. Harriet was born. A year later I gave birth to a little boy who died soon after. I was heartbroken and I had damage in my reproductive organs so I knew I couldn't get pregnant again. When Ethel's parents died your grandfather and I decided to take her in too. So there I was with two little girls under five. Because I couldn't have any more children, your grandfather and I did what most couples did in those days, we ceased having sexual relations. For me that was all right because I didn't get much pleasure from it anyway. For your grandfather it was another unhappy experience.

Childbearing was horrendous. Of course the midwife was there but that didn't help the pain. Immediately after, the work began again. There were no washing machines, of course, and we had no hired help. Your grandfather was very busy in the bakery and so I pretty well had to raise two little girls on my own. In my day there was never a question about the father doing much child care.

Maybe that is part of the reason that Harriet and I were so close. I am aware of the fact that Ethel did not have a very pleasant life in those days. I think she was the odd one out. She went to Montana after she graduated from teacher's college and we never saw her again.

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I would sum up my child raising days as the time when I was the happiest because Harriet filled my life up. I think that is the way Harriet looked upon having children. You could answer that better than I--what did she have to say?

Love, Grandmother

Dear Nik,

No doubt I wanted to have children because I remembered what a wonderful experience it had been for my mother. I was everything to her and I felt that I wanted to have that kind of closeness too. By 1944, childbirth had been relegated to the doctors and the hospitals. My mother had never told me about the pain--I guess she repressed it--but I had done nursing training so I knew a little about it. What I didn't know was how difficult my life would become at home.

George was no help at all. In fact he became impossible if either of you kids woke him up at night. As a result I would walk the floor with one or the other of you, sometimes all night, to keep you quiet. I was always exhausted. Being a mother was strictly a solitary occupation, even before your father died. In fact, after he died, life was somewhat easier because I didn't have to worry about him anymore. It was just you kids and me.

I once told you that you shouldn't be surprised if you didn't love your children at first. Since 1 died before you had any, 1 wonder if that is how you experienced it.

Love, Mom

Dear Mom and Grandma,

Yes, Mom, I loved my children from the beginning, but like you two, I also experienced a lot of pain in childbirth. And like you two 1 had never been told what labour was really going to be like. There were a lot of things I had never been told.

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In fact I don't think I knew what being a mother was going to be like. I don't think you were a typical mother, Mom, in that George and I had to grow up pretty fast to help you survive those years. You were not home much and I didn't expect to be either. When I did have Sarah I found being at home all the time impossible and a complete change from what I'd been accustomed to.

There was another difference between you and me. I did not want to have children to assuage my loneliness. I had a good companion in Peter by that time.

I don't really know why I had children but my feeling is that it was a simple biological drive. I know that at 29 I was telling friends that I did not have any desire to have kids. And then at 30 I rather suddenly did want kids.

The shock for me, and for you I would guess, in having kids was the loss of freedom, identity and control over my own life, the isolation, the loneliness, and exclusion from normal adult life except for special circumstances. Where was the kid who could converse with me and who could go places with Peter and me, who would join our happy twosome and make a happy threesome? I had no idea what to expect when I had Sarah.

The first year was very tough. Even though Peter offered support and practical assistance, he could not possibly offer enough in the society in which we live. He should be home to do half the child care. I was very angry, I felt duped. My rights had been violated, my space had been invaded. At the same time I knew that this was not Sarah's fault. To deal with my anger I went to see a psychiatrist. She told me I was cold, controlling and afraid of intimacy and if I wanted to fix that I could come to see her twice a week, indefinitely, at a cost to me of $25 a session (above medical insurance). She could not tell me what kind of person I would be at the end (if the end ever came) and she would not see Peter with me. With the strength instilled in me by my foremothers I kindly refused her offer of treatment.

Very luckily, within a couple months of that experience, there was a conference about women's issues and perspectives and I went to hear other women speak. To my utter astonishment I heard women talk about the same anger I was feeling, the same vulnerabilities, the same rotten deals in life. It was enough to hear others talk about the same issues, even if the solutions weren't available. I was not alone anymore and I saw that it wasn't me who was needing therapy. I decided to look upon my family as a laboratory in which the survival of women, as full and independent adults, in the context of a family, would be the goal.

Childrearing has been, for me, a continuous struggle because I want so much in life and I feel 1 deserve it. I see my birthright as full as Peter's and I will accept no less. Combining those goals and values with the realities of bringing up children, the time they take, the emotional energy they demand from me, and, paradoxically, the love I get from and with them makes life touch and go most days. Unlike both of you, though, I will not have my children as the ends or the means in my life. To be separate and apart from them and to bring them up to be separate and apart from me is my goal. In doing that, I think there will be more freedom to give and take what we each need and want. When I want rubbing, I ask for it, Mom. And I get it.

Time is drawing to a close and there is one last thing I want to hear about. And that is the end, or death. Both of you are dead, both of you buried your husbands, and we all buried our mothers. So often women are left alone to face this part of life--the death, the burial, the life alone following death. I think it's a human issue, but it's a women's issue because women are so often the ones who are left. Tell me what it was like for you both. You first, Grandma.

Love, Nik

Death

Dear Nikki,

I'm glad this is the last thing we are going to discuss. I grow weary of these provocative and emotional questions. I can see that knowing you in life would have been a demanding and intense experience!

Sickness and death were things that were common in the home as I was growing up in Minnesota in the late nineteenth century. I, with my mother, cared for my father when he was dying and when my mother was dying I nursed her for some weeks. Women frequently met death in the house, while men met it away from home, for instance in war or at work. Childbirth was often associated with death; either the child or the mother often died. I experienced my own son's death shortly after he was born.

When your grandfather died, Harriet was already in her teens and was of great help to me. Throughout the years I grew less emotional about death--some people called that being strong. I really think it was just being numb. Death was so common; numbness was an alternative to collapse. What would have killed me would have been to have experienced Harriet's death. But luckily I did not have that fate--she was the one who experienced mine.

Love, Grandmother

Dear Nik,

I remember you asking me about this when you were about 12. The death that most affected me in my life was my mother's. I was very strong, as she had taught me to be, and so I shed few tears. But shortly after her death, in the hospital where she died, the nurses had some of her personal effects like her false teeth. I overheard them joking about what to do with them and it is then that 1 felt the full impact of her death. The shallowness juxtaposed to the depth, in that brief moment, was profound. I was all alone, of course. My mother and I had been everything to each other. There was no one to go home to. I think there are two things about women and the experience of death which are different from men's experience. First of all, men rarely die before their mate. They are not left alone. And the fact that men were usually the financial providers in my day meant that the women left behind were often financially destitute. That was true when my father died; it was true when my husband died.

The second thing is that when women experience the death of another woman, there is a loss of a whole emotional world that frequently has been intimate and alive. This intimacy--like what we talked about in an earlier letter about loving--is often not part of a male-female relationship. So not only does a woman lose the companionship of another woman when she dies, she loses a whole emotional support which existed at many different levels. That was true when my mother died and I think it was true for you when I died.

Love, Mom

Dear Mom,

In modern day life I think that death sometimes comes before the body quits functioning. I think you went through many different levels of death--these levels were the last operation, the infection, the forced retirement, the depression, the shock treatments, the cessation of your ability to function, what they would come to call Alzheimer's disease. I lived through each one of those deaths with you, and, yes, I lost an emotional support which existed at many different levels. By the time your body died, I had ceased being your main companion, what with you being in the nursing home and me married and living 500 miles away. So the greatest impact of your "deaths" for me was the loss of your emotional support.

At the beginning of those losses, I was with Donald. He could not respond to those times, and, interestingly enough, used those experiences as a reason for falling in love with someone else. He once wrote to me that what was happening in regards to you and our life was like a "circus." So, even though I was married, I would say that I experienced the early part of your death alone. Later, I was, in fact, alone. Even though my husband, Peter, and my brother were physically with me at your funeral, emotionally I was alone.

Your last letters were the reflection of a beaten and lonely woman who had invested all she had in others, but who in the end was alone.

When I look back at your life I see that you had been beaten where other women had been beaten before you--marriage, child raising, economics, denial of loving, and death. Death was artificially induced in you--it was not of your own choosing. As the recipient of the experts' advice, you, like so many other women before you, became a victim, not a beneficiary. Because you were a woman, in death, as in life, the choice was hardly ever yours.

Love, Nik

"Peter, does it say anything? Or is it just a conglomeration of experiences and memories dropped onto pages?"

"Yes, it does say something. For instance, if I were to have written a paper entitled, "My Grandfather, My Father, and Myself," the paper would have been full of optimism, opportunity and accomplishment. What you have written is a stark contrast to that. But it needs to be pulled together. It needs a conclusion."

Conclusion

Dear Sarah,

If you ever read these letters I wonder what you will think. I hope you don't see your great-grandmother, your grandmother and your mother as just individuals who may have had hard times, who broke new ground, and who had feelings unique and peculiar to their own lives. Because we were more than individuals. We were women, sharing women's experiences; women who had lived before us and women who had lived with us. We were our mother's daughters and we were our daughter's mothers and you are part of that connection.

I hope that as you live out your life you won't think marriage is inevitable, that you won't marry for economic reasons or to get away from home. I hope that you see that marriage is no escape. I hope that if you choose to marry you will love the person you choose.

I am not sure that marriage is a positive thing for a woman. If you want children, it may not be necessary for you to marry. Your potential can be fulfilled on your own. If you want companionship, look to other women and feel free to love them in your own way, whatever feels right for you. You can also look to men but expect nothing more from them (and in fact may get less) than you would from a woman.

If you have children, know that it is not easy. Know that child care is demanding as well as rewarding, that you will need support. You deserve and have a right to that support, whether it comes from men or other women. Maybe in your day men will be able to provide it--they can't today. I hope you live in a "society that is organized around human needs: a society in which child raising is not dismissed as each woman's individual problem, but in which the nurturance and well-being of all children is a transcendent public priority." (13)

If you run into trouble, as we all have, look to your women friends and your family for support. Don't rush off to an "expert," for "wisdom about daily life is not hoarded by 'experts' or doled out as a commodity but is drawn from the experience of all people and [should be] freely shared among them." (14)

At the end of it all, when I die and when you die, let us be able to say that most of what had happened to us while we lived had been our choice, in spite of the fact we were women.

Love, Mommy

Epilogue

This paper was but one example of the way Jeri Wine opened me up to looking at things from a critical perspective, allowed me to walk the talk of "the personal is political," and allowed me to value my experience and the experiences of my foremothers. I have hoped, by using this paper as an example, to show how Jeri's feminist pedagogy brought women's history to life for me. Her encouragement allowed me to apply what I was reading to my own life. This example shows how feminist research, in which we locate ourselves, can be so effective.

Two years after I wrote this paper, Jeri was part of a group of professors at OISE who developed a program in Community Psychology for either a Master's or PhD degree. I was accepted into the PhD program and finished in 1990. The focus of the Community Psychology program was, obviously, the community. We can look at the individual level as long as we want but in the end, most people's emotional problems are embedded in a social context and that context is played out in the community.

My first position post-PhD was perfect for a community psychologist. I was hired to design and implement a farm stress program in Saskatchewan and I did that for over 11 years. A long way from Feminist Issues as they Relate to My Grandmother, My Mother and Myself, you might think. Not really. First, I contextualized agriculture politically, socially, and economically. Many farmers, those who struggle financially, see themselves as oppressed at the hands of bankers, the government, their families, and global economics to name a few. There are almost as many women farmers as men, but they are invisible at decision-making tables, whether those tables are in the home or at the governmental levels. Choice over the big-picture items such as livelihood, health, and well-being is often not in the hands of a farmer, male or female--these things are in the hands of government policy, the weather, interest rates, etc. As Jeri emphasized in community psychology, the community psyche often determines the individual psyche. Some of the themes in my article for Jeri were contextualization, oppression, invisibility, and lack of choice. These were reproduced in my work with farmers.

I came to work more with rural women around issues of their health and well-being. I was able to do research on such things as farm stress, resiliency, and the effects of the erosion of farm programs on farm women. In my counselling work I could see the same issues my grandmother, my mother and I experienced reflected in the lives of these farm women. The self-reflexivity that Jeri nurtured in me has come forward many times as I've worked with these and many other women as a counsellor.

In 2001 I became an administrator in a publicly funded mental health clinic and continued on as an adjunct professor in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan. In the mental health clinic I coordinate about a dozen people (two men) who work with people who are emotionally unwell, many of whom are women. Excellent practitioners all, I encourage them to do research, because theory rises from experience and they and their clients have experience in spades. I encourage them to publish because their work needs to be visible. I have spent the past 16 years as a clinical supervisor or consultant and I think most of the people I have supervised will tell you that "the personal is political" is never far from our thoughts in this work.

My daughter is now 25 and a teacher. She has won an award because of a paper she wrote on transsexuals and their struggles. My son, who is 22 and just graduating from university, wrote about how First Nations peoples have been cheated, basing his work on the history and components of Treaty 6. Both of them have been immersed their whole lives, often over the dinner table, in social critical analysis and now they live it. My partner of 32 years and I have struggled with different roles and a different relationship than our parents had. As I near 60 I think we've come as far as we can in our generation. It's much further than either my grandmother or my mother came but there is more to do to equalize power, share responsibility, respond to each other's needs.

Jeri's legacy is lived out in my work, in the people l work with, in the children I've had, in the relationships I've had, in the activism I've done, in the research I do, in the papers I publish. I was very fortunate to have had Jeri Wine as a teacher and a mentor.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

Nikki Gerrard

College of Medicine

University of Saskatchewan

Saskatoon, SK

Notes

(1.) Gerda Lerner, The Female Experience: An American Documental. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1977, p. xxv.

(2.) Lerner, p. xxv.

(3.) Anne Wilson Schaef, Women's Reality. Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1981.

(4.) Lerner, p. 43.

(5.) Barbara Easton, "Feminism and the Contemporary Family," A Heritage of Her Own, Nancy Cott and Elizabeth Pleck, eds., New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979, p. 559.

(6.) Lerner, p. 59.

(7.) Dale Spender, There's Always Been a Women's Movement This Century. London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley; Pandora Press, 1983, p. 102.

(8.) Dora Russell, in Spender, p.102.

(9.) Stricker, Prank, "'Cookbooks and Law Books: The Hidden History of Career Women in Twentieth-Century America", A Heritage of Her Own, Cott & Pleck, eds., p.492.

(10.) Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America", A Heritage of Her Own, Cott and Pleck, eds., p. 314.

(11.) Cott and Pleck, p. 321

(12.) Cott and Pleck, p. 331

(13.) Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice To Women. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979, p. 324.

(14.) Ehrenreich and English, p. 324