Jo Ann Citron
Jo Ann Citron joined the Women’s Studies Department in the fall of 2002 as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Her appointment at Wellesley marks a return to the academic life from which she had strayed to practice law.
Jo Ann did her undergraduate work at Vassar College and in 1986 completed a Ph.D. in English at Boston University. Her dissertation examined narrative structures and female subjectivity in the novels of Jane Austen. The following year she accepted an appointment at Bates College as the English Department’s Victorianist. By this time, Jo Ann had been teaching literature to college students for over 15 years, mostly at B.U., briefly at M.I.T., and now at Bates.
It was while she was at Bates that she realized that almost nothing she read in the morning’s New York Times had anything to do with what she was doing with the rest of her day. At about the same time, she realized that as a specialist in Victorian literature, she almost never read living authors. When a colleague noted that “when Jo Ann says ‘the ‘60s’ she is referring to the 1860s,” Citron decided it was time to make a change.
Trading texts for torts, she entered Northeastern University School of Law, graduating in 1992 and passing bar exams in Massachusetts and New York. She also began reading living authors. Fortune smiled and she found a dream job with a small civil rights litigation firm that concentrated in discrimination and constitutional law. The firm was best known for its police misconduct practice and Jo Ann spent a fair amount of time behind the wheel hoping that if she got pulled over it wouldn’t be by one of the police officers she was suing. The firm also handled cases involving discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodation. Among her clients from those years were a young girl who was improperly strip searched by a police officer, a man who was denied employment in a topless bar because he had small breasts, a family that was denied housing because they were Chinese, a man who was barred from a restaurant because he couldn’t get his wheelchair into it, and a woman whose husband sought to keep her from seeing her children because she had fallen in love with another woman.
But Jo Ann doesn’t just sue people. She has, for example, consulted for the Northeastern University Domestic Violence Institute. As its Technology Director under a grant from the Soros Foundation, she developed strategies for involving the private bar in the delivery of public interest legal services. For several years, she served on the board of the Women’s Bar Association (WBA) and was instrumental in developing the family law project, which provides pro bono and low-cost legal services for families victimized by domestic violence. From 1998 to 2002 she was a trustee of the Women’s Bar Foundation (WBF), which administers all of the WBA’s pro bono legal services programs. As its Vice-President and finance chair, she created the Foundation’s first major fund-raising event.
After she had practiced law for about a decade, Jo Ann found the academic life calling to her again, more sweetly this time for having nothing to do with tenure. From 2000–2002, she was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley (now the Wellesley Centers for Women) where she began, “The Gay Divorcée: How Same-Sex Couples Break Up,” which remains in progress. Following the expiration of her term there, she was thrilled to be invited to move across Route 16 to pursue her work within the Women’s Studies Department where she teaches an advanced seminar, “The Changing Law, the New Family, and the State,” along with the occasional course on Victorian novels. (You never get over your first love.)
Jo Ann has written on a variety of topics in both literature and law, and has especially enjoyed writing the many pieces she has contributed over the years to The Women’s Review of Books right here at Wellesley (Jo Ann is a Vassar girl but her Wellesley connections proliferate). In 2006, Jo Ann opened Citron Law, a domestic relations practice that handles divorce, child custody disputes, and property disputes arising from the end of non-marital relationships.
Jo Ann is on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and has recently been elected to the board of the Massachusetts Lesbian and Gay Bar Association where she chairs its Family Law Section.
***
Profile last updated: 8/06