A Tribute to Jeri Dawn Wine (Introduction‪)‬

Jeri Wine was an activist, a teacher, a scholar, and a therapist. She was an extremely important mentor to me as a lesbian, a feminist, and as a professor in Community Psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). I very much wanted to pay tribute to Jeri as a way of expressing my gratitude for all that she did for me, and many of the former students and colleagues of Jeri's who I approached to contribute to this special issue felt the same way--they owed her something because of all that she had done for them when they were students and in their careers. Jeri was a pioneer in the fields of lesbian studies, community psychology and women's mental health issues, and feminist organizing for change. She wrote many important and often ground breaking scholarly articles (a few of which are reprinted in this issue). She was a professor at OISE from 1975 to 1992 in Counselling and Community Psychology and Feminist Studies. She was chair of the Department of Psychology for three years, served as president of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) and the Canadian Women's Studies Association (CWSA), was active in the Centre for Women's Studies in Education (CWSE) at OISE and served on the editorial board of Resources for Feminist Research (RFR). In the community, she was a member of the Feminist Party of Canada and a member of Women Against Violence Against Women. Jeri left OISE and academe in an effort to regain her health after having suffered for many years with health issues that seemed to be the result of the sick building on Bloor St. that housed OISE (in this collection both Paula Caplan and Kathleen Rockhill, who were colleagues of Jeri's, speak directly about the controversies over the safety of the building and the impact on their own health). Jeri moved to Charlottetown and later to Halifax where she had an active psychotherapy practice and where she continued to work on issues of social justice through her involvement with the Raging Grannies in Halifax. She died far too young, in 2004, at the age 66, as a result of a disease finally diagnosed as mesothelioma, an asbestos-related cancer that is 100% environmentally induced and that takes 20 to 30 years to develop.