Today, December 6, is Canada’s National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Every year on this day, Canada commemorates a terrible act of violence directed at women solely because of their gender.
L’Ecole Polytechnique is an engineering school affiliated with the Universite de Montreal. On December 6, 1989, a deranged gunman named Marc Lepine entered L’Ecole Polytechnique. He went into a mechanical engineering classroom, ordered the men to leave the room. He asked the female students if they knew why they were there, and told them it was because he was “fighting feminism”. He told them that they were women studying to be engineers, that that made them feminists, and that he hated feminists. He then shot every one of the nine female students. Six were killed.
Lepine then went on a rampage through the rest of the school, shooting at any women he encountered, and several male students along the way. He killed eight more female students. Approximately twenty minutes after he had begun his attack, he shot himself in the head in a room full of students, four of whom he had just shot. Lepine was dead before police arrived on the scene.
All in all, Marc Lepine shot and killed fourteen women solely because they were women who had the audacity to study engineering, a field that he believed only men had the right to enter. He had become convinced that feminism was resulting in women taking jobs that rightfully belonged to men, and because of “feminism” he had been unable to get admitted to L’Ecole Polytechnique. In a suicide note found on his body, he blamed feminists for ruining his life, and named nineteen women that he hoped to kill. Some of those women were public figures, like a TV star, and others were everyday women who happened to come to Lepine’s deranged attention, like the six female police officers who Lepine heard about because they had formed a volleyball team.
The legacy of the Montreal Massacre included a real awareness as to how much violent misogyny exists in the world, and a deep commitment to gun control in Quebec, fittingly both things that Lepine would have deplored.
Every year, we remember the fourteen women who Lepine killed, that we may never forget them or the hideous misogyny that led to their deaths so that they will not have died utterly in vain.
The dead were:
- Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
- Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
- Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
- Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
- Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
- Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
- Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
- Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
- Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student
We remember them, we remember the others who were wounded, and we work to end the violence that women face every day simply because of their gender. We symbolize this by wearing a white ribbon in memory, and in a pledge to end the violence that took their lives. Never again.
Image from Amy Dianna’s flickr.
