JAFFARY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-06-09 published
CHEDA,
Sherrill▼
Suddenly on June 7, 2008 at the Princess Margaret Hospital at
the age of 72 years. Beloved wife of Karl
JAFFARY.
Loving mother
of Marc PERRY and Andrew
PERRY.
Mourned as well by Karl's children
Eric Dennis
JAFFARY
(Aeylya
HUSEIN) and Nora Elizabeth
JAFFARY
(Edward OSOWSKI.)
Grandmother to Kate, Isabella, Desiree and
Michael PERRY as well as Luc
JAFFARY-
OSOWSKI and Adam Stuart
JAFFARY. Dear daughter of Abe
SCHNEIDER and the late Myrtle
STOUT.
She is also survived by her sisters Marcia
WHISMAN and Kathie
JOHNSON
and her brother Ralph
SCHNEIDER.
She will also be remembered
by her very dedicated friend Phyllis
YAFFE.
The family will receive
Friends at the Humphrey Funeral Home - A.W. Miles Chapel, 1403 Bayview
Avenue (south of Eglinton Avenue East) from 7-9 p.m. on Tuesday,
June 10th. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Canadian
Women's Foundation, 133 Richmond St. West, Suite 504, Toronto,
Ontario, M5H 2L3. Condolences and memories may be forwarded through
www.humphreymiles.com.
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JAFFARY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-06-09 published
Sherrill CHEDA: 72
Feminist Activist Electrified Library Work In Canada
By Sandra MARTIN,
Page▼
S10
Sherrill CHEDA, a feminist librarian, arts administrator and
cultural activist, died of complications from acute leukemia
at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto early Saturday morning.
She was 72.
Ms. CHEDA, born in a small town in Indiana, earned her master's
in library science at the University of Indiana. Opposed to the
Vietnam War, she immigrated to Canada in 1967 with her two sons
and her then-partner, Michael
CHEDA, a draft dodger.
While working as a librarian in the Toronto area, she joined
forces with Phyllis
YAFFE and Barbara
CLUBB, two like-minded
feminist librarians and founded the newsletter, Emergency! Librarian,
a compendium of book reviews, news and opinion that electrified
the library profession in Canada.
A Canadian cultural nationalist, Ms.
CHEDA later worked as an
administrator for the Canadian Periodical Publishers Association,
the Ontario Arts Council and the Ontario government.
She was a columnist for Chatelaine under editor Doris Anderson
and was one of the founders of the New Feminists in the early
1970s.
She leaves her husband, Karl
JAFFARY, a lawyer and former Toronto
politician, sons Marc and Andrew, two stepchildren, six grandchildren
and her extended family. The funeral will be held on Wednesday
at 4. p.m. at Humphrey Funeral Home on Bayview Avenue in Toronto.
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JAFFARY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-06-21 published
Activist librarian made a difference in publishing, literature
and the arts
'Feminist and peacenik' challenged the status quo, launched the
journal Emergency Librarian and helped stabilize Canada's magazine
industry. 'Her principles were so much a part of her life'
By Sandra MARTIN,
Page▲
S12
'The times they are a-changin,' Bob Dylan sang in 1964 in a song
that captured the upsurge of political and social upheaval as
a generation of mostly privileged boomers came of age, questioning
all manner of establishment authority. Protests against poverty,
racism and the Vietnam War grabbed the headlines, but second-wave
feminism was also in full throttle in the United States. Betty
Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which argued that housework
and childrearing were not the only ways to be fulfilled as a
woman, had kick-started the movement after its publication in
1963. In Canada, Doris Anderson (obituary March 3, 2007), who
had become editor of Chatelaine in 1956, was offering her readers
thoughtful and provocative articles about all sorts of taboo
topics, such as abortion and contraception, and was urging women
to take off their aprons and run for public office.
Fast forward almost a decade to Winnipeg. Early in 1973, Harry
Easton, the city's chief librarian and president of the Canadian
Library
Association, asked two young librarians, Phyllis
YAFFE
and Barbara
CLUBB, to organize the theme day at the annual Canadian
Library Association conference, which was to be held that June
in Sackville, New Brunswick They took on the unpaid task, but
they gave their own feminist twist to the theme, "Librarians:
beginning, middle and end of career." Specifically, they focused
on female librarians and why it was that men held virtually all
of the executive positions in a profession in which women occupied
the vast majority of jobs.
Needing a speaker, they phoned broadcaster Barbara Frum at the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, who declined; then Doris Anderson,
who also demurred, but who recommended Sherrill
CHEDA, an ardent
feminist and the chief librarian at Seneca College in Toronto.
That is how Ms.
CHEDA came to deliver a keynote address entitled
That Special Little Mechanism, referring to the appendage that
men carry between their legs.
Delivered by a tiny powerhouse of a woman slightly over five
feet tall, who was barely visible above a massive podium that
tended to skitter across the stage, the speech was a knock out.
Studded with anecdotes and statistics, it not only articulated
the reality that many female librarians lived, but it acquired
a legitimacy because of the forum in which it was delivered -
the profession's annual conference.
"It was shocking," Ms.
YAFFE, now vice-chairwoman of the board
of Ryerson University and former Chief Executive Officer of Alliance
Atlantis, said in a telephone interview. "Nobody asked questions
like that." Afterwards, the triumvirate of Ms.
CHEDA,
Ms.
YAFFE
and Ms. CLUBB (now the chief librarian of the City of Ottawa)
sat on the lawn and plotted their next move: The launch of the
oddly titled journal Emergency Librarian, a compendium of book
reviews, news, and information infused with feminist voices from
the alternative press and radical librarians.
Ms. CHEDA and Ms.
YAFFE (who moved to Toronto in September, 1973 and
was hired by Ms.
CHEDA as a reference librarian at Seneca College)
organized the editorial in meetings after work at Ms.
CHEDA's
kitchen table while Ms.
CLUBB maintained the subscription lists
in Winnipeg. "Getting information to people was so empowering.
We had a social purpose," said Ms.
YAFFE who became lifelong
Friends with Ms.
CHEDA. "
She▲ was loyal and caring and inspiring
because her principles were so much a part of her life. She was
a feminist and a peacenik and absolutely against prejudice of
any kind."
Sherrill SCHNEIDER was born in the mid-1930s in Osgood, Indiana,
a small town in the American Midwest between Indianapolis and
Cincinnati.
Her father, Abraham (Abe)
SCHNEIDER, was a Russian
Jew from Kiev who had walked across Ukraine to Hamburg with his
mother and two siblings to escape the pogroms following the Russian
revolution. His ultimate destination was Indiana, where his father
had settled. That's where Abe
SCHNEIDER met and married Myrtle
STOUT, the descendant of early Protestant settlers on the eastern
coast of the United States. Sherrill was the eldest of their
four children.
Over the years Abe
SCHNEIDER ran both a shoe and a dry-goods
store before going into the scrap-metal business with his father,
a business that continues to thrive. Sherrill, who was the valedictorian
of her high school, was the first person in her family to go
to university. She went briefly to Hanover College, a small private
Presbyterian College, in 1954, and then entered the University
of Indiana in Bloomington the following September.
Her plan was to become an academic, but the male head of the
English department discouraged her dreams by saying dismissively
that studying for a doctorate would be a waste of time because
she was probably going to get married and have babies. She fulfilled
that prediction by marrying a fellow student named Noël
PERRY
in June, 1958, just after she graduated with a bachelor's degree.
While he completed his undergraduate degree she entered the master's
program in library science - which, along with teaching and nursing,
was then an acceptable occupation for ambitious women. By September,
1959, three months and three courses short of acquiring her library
degree, she had moved to San Francisco where her husband had
found a job with Social Security, and had produced her first
son, Marc (named after the artist Marc Chagall).
The family moved to Baltimore in 1962, where their second son,
Andrew, was born that May. Four months later, Ms.
CHEDA began
working in the history and social-sciences department of the
Enoch Pratt Free Library. She earned $4,000 a year and was advised
that if she wanted to succeed she should wear pearls and white
gloves to work and use Jacqueline Kennedy as a role model. A year
later the library gave her a leave of absence to complete her
MLS at Indiana University. Thereafter, she and her family
moved back to San Francisco where she worked as a librarian at
San Francisco State College. Along with her husband, she became
involved with the growing resistance to the Vietnam War.
The Perrys' marriage fell apart in 1966 in San Francisco during
the era of love and peace. She subsequently moved across the
border to Vancouver with her children and her new partner, Michael
CHEDA, a draft dodger. She worked in the libraries of the University
of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. They married
in 1969, about the time he moved to Toronto to take a job with
CFTO television in Markham. She followed with her children
several months later and began working at the library of the
Indian and Eskimo Association, and then as chief librarian at
Seneca
College.
Her marriage to Mr.
CHEDA broke up in about 1975.
Having grown totally frustrated by the lack of professional opportunities
and the inequitable share of household responsibilities that
she shouldered, Ms.
CHEDA became a member of the New Feminists,
a group that had split from the Toronto Women's Liberation Movement
in April, 1969, over ideological differences. Although she had
enthusiastically embraced feminism and the concept of women supporting
and loving other women, she did draw some lines. Arriving at
a feminist consciousness-raising session in a church basement,
Ms. CHEDA was given a mirror and invited to get better acquainted
with her vagina. "Give me a break," Ms.
CHEDA whispered to her
friend Shelagh Wilkinson, who had also declined the mirror on
the grounds that, as a trained nurse and midwife, she had seen
more then enough vaginas.
Nobody seems to remember exactly how Ms.
CHEDA met Ms. Anderson
at Chatelaine, but they probably connected in 1972 when Ms.
CHEDA
began trying to express her feminist ideas in print. They had
many common interests, not least of which was the challenge of
trying to raise independent sons in a patriarchal society.
Nine months after her Sackville speech, Ms.
CHEDA dropped her
second feminist shoe when she published the article How to Raise
Liberated Children in Chatelaine in March, 1974. Described as
a practical parent's guide, the article itemized how her sons
were expected to make their own lunches, get themselves around
town, make dinner once a week and do laundry and other household
tasks. There was an outraged response from many readers, but
Ms. CHEDA and Ms. Anderson were not deterred. Another article,
On The Way to Liberation: One housewife-mother-librarian's personal
and painful journey from martyr mom to liberated person, appeared
six months later. About this time, Ms.
CHEDA became the expert
fielding questions from readers in a monthly advice column, Ask
A Feminist.
As for her own kids, they grew up in a household that embraced
peace activists, feminists and gay couples. Her son Marc, now
a research administrator in the faculty of medicine at the University
of Toronto, says that he didn't really have much choice about
doing his share of the housework (unlike his Friends, whose mothers
made their beds and prepared their lunches), but he had a lot
of freedom. His mother was always willing to talk to him "about
major things going on in her life, like the life-changing thing
that happened after my stepfather moved out. We had a real heart-to-heart,
so it wasn't like I never had input," he said. "We were consulted,
and we were consulted at a very early age."
Contributing to a magazine such as Chatelaine is a lot easier
than running one, especially a start-up operation like Emergency
Librarian.
Because
Ms.
CHEDA knew nothing about the mechanics
of publishing magazines, she joined an organization called the
Canadian Periodical Publishers Association in the mid-1970s and
was soon elected to its board of directors. Eventually, probably
in 1979 or 1980, she was asked to take on the job of executive
director of the floundering, nearly bankrupt group. Even though
it meant working for a lower salary and giving up the pension
and other benefits she had at Seneca, Ms.
CHEDA accepted the
challenge.
As an arts administrator she applied the organizational, research
and management skills she had learned as a librarian. She travelled
across the country by train and bus, sleeping on sofas in the
homes of Canadian Periodical Publishers Association members to
rally enthusiasm for the floundering organization. Within a year
she had turned it around; then she began developing a distribution
system that actually helped Canadian magazines reach their subscribers
and improve their business prospects.
In the mid-1970s, Ms.
CHEDA met lawyer Karl
JAFFARY, a former
alderman for the old city of Toronto. Also interested in the
arts and involved with the Canadian Periodical Publishers Association,
Mr. JAFFARY acted for her when she sued the now defunct Weekend
magazine on December 17, 1977, for "outing" her as a lesbian
in an article called Gay in the Seventies. She won a libel settlement
of $5,000 which Mr.
JAFFARY advised her to use as a down payment
on a rental house in the east end of the city. Over the years
they became close Friends. He was drawn to her for "the things
that everybody liked about her - she would not take shit from
anybody." He admired her independent spirit and her intellect
and shared her passions for books, the arts - especially little
theatre companies - and organizations dedicated to promoting
social justice. They married on May 30, 1987, a union that by
all accounts was extremely happy.
By then Ms.
CHEDA had left the Canadian Periodical Publishers
Association, worked for four years as registrar at the Ontario
Arts Council and had shifted, in 1986, to the Culture and Communications
Branch of the Ontario government. "With her dynamism, drive and
creativity, she put together the Ontario Publishing Centre in
the fall of 1991 to help the book and magazine publishing industry
in a very bad economic time," said cultural bureaucrat Jim Polk,
who was hired to work under Ms.
CHEDA on the book side. "Sherrill
was very wily and inventive in working with the structure and
very demanding of her staff, but in a good way," he said. Before
a change of government and the dismantling of the centre in 1995,
it gave out nearly $15-million in support money to help book
and magazine publishers computerize and modernize their supply
and marketing systems. "She intended to make a difference in
literature and the arts, and she did," said Mr. Polk.
After a few miserable years in the mid- to late 1990s, dismantling
many of the programs she had helped create, Ms.
CHEDA took early
retirement from the Ontario government. For the last several
years she and Mr.
JAFFARY travelled, went to the theatre, read
books and relished Ms.
CHEDA's talents as a gourmet cook. In
November, 2004, Ms.
CHEDA suffered a stroke which immobilized
her left side. She responded well to treatment, although she
was left with a slight limp. Besides being an informal reference
source for Friends and families about essential books, restaurants,
plays and trips, she was one of four guest editors, along with
Sally Armstrong, Michele Landsberg and Shelagh Wilkinson, of
a special volume of Canadian Woman Studies entitled Celebrating
Doris Anderson, which was published in December 2007.
Late last month, Ms.
CHEDA developed persistent flu-like symptoms.
A blood test led to a diagnosis of acute adult leukemia. The
next day she suffered a terminal stroke, which gave her family
its second terrible shock in as many days.
Sherrill CHEDA was born in Osgood, Indiana, on February 15, 1936.
She died at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto of complications
from acute leukemia early on the morning of June 7, 2008. She
was 72. Ms.
CHEDA leaves her husband, Karl
JAFFARY, and her sons
Marc and Andrew. She also leaves her grandchildren Kate, Isabella,
Desiree and Michael, her father Abe
SCHNEIDER, her three siblings
and her extended family.
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