14 Women Died - PAY ATTENTION TO THAT

On this day 24 years ago, Marc Lepine entered Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and found a classroom of 60 engineering students. At gunpoint, he ordered the men to leave the classroom while the 9 women in the class were asked to line up against the wall. Later, the men would say they were confused, hesitant - but they all left. The women were shot. Six were killed instantly and three were injured. Lepine then left the classroom and continued to seek out female students throughout the school, entering classrooms, administration offices and the cafeteria and firing on every woman he saw. At one point a wounded woman asked for help. He stabbed her to death.

Before he took his own life he had murdered 14 women and injured several more.

In the wake of this massacre, the press labeled Lepine a sick man and said that it was coincidence that only women were killed. They said that he, too, was a victim of society's cruelty. When his suicide note was later leaked anonymously to Francine Pelletier, a reporter whose name was found on a hit-list in Lepine's pocket, it showed that he was specifically targeting women he viewed as feminists, stating that they had ruined his life. Lepine was denied entry to the school and determined that if the school - which traditionally had only enrolled men - hadn't had female students, he would have been granted admission. For the record, this is untrue. He did not meet the school's enrollment standards.

On this day we remember:

Genevieve Bergeron

Helene Colgan

Nathalie Croteau

Barbara Daigneault

Anne-Marie Edward

Maud Haviernick

Maryse Laganiere

Maryse Leclair

Anne-Marie Lemay

Sonia Pelletier

Michele Richard

Annie St-Arneault

Annie Turcotte

Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz

I know most of you scrolled through that list. I know it seems like just a bunch of names. But it is so much more. Each of those names is a woman who would be an engineer today. They would be mothers and wives. Their parents would be grandparents now. They would have never heard of Marc Lepine. Instead, there are childless parents. There is cold stone where there should be warm skin. There is a man today who is married to a different woman, or who never married at all because the woman he was meant to be with was killed December 6th, 1989. People compare death to snuffing out a candle, but that's not true. A candle can be reignited. We lost those women forever, and with their deaths the face of Canadian feminism changed.

Here's why this is still relevant.

For a heartbeat in Canadian history, people thought about taking a step back. They thought, why put our women's lives at risk by pushing them into uncharted territory? If those 14 women were never in an engineering school, they'd still be alive. Maybe we should stop progressing towards this mythical concept of equality. Maybe we should focus on sheltering women from these harsh realities. Maybe we don't need female engineers. Maybe...

And then the Canadian heart, strong as always, beat on. As a collective we realized that that line of thinking is toxic. It's repulsive. One man's delusional actions should not halt the progress that we've made as a society. We must fight back! Not with guns, not with knives (the weapons of choice for Lepine) but with female engineers! Female politicians! Female doctors and lawyers and welders and electricians! With equality! With rights! What a beautiful thing.  As feminist Andrea Dworkin said "It is incumbent upon each of us to be the woman that Marc Lepine wanted to kill. We must live with this honour, this courage. We must drive out fear. We must hold on. We must create. We must resist."

Here's why I wrote this post. Because I have a point to drive home, and it is this: If you, like me, are glad to hear of the progress we've made in spite of Lepine's wishes, if you felt inspired by Dworkin's words, if you are happy that we have female engineers today, then why do we ask women to stay home at night, or not drink as much, or dress more conservatively to avoid sexual assault? In the circumstances of the Montreal Massacre, Canada could have withdrawn all female students. But we didn't. We pushed on, because we knew that it was not feminism but Lepine's anti-feminism that was at fault. We knew not to blame the victims simply for being in a classroom learning about a male-dominated field. We knew that they were innocent, and Lepine was guilty. Why then, when it is sexual assault do we ask what the woman could have done to prevent it?

We must, as a culture, as a community, acknowledge whole-heartedly that the victim is innocent and the aggressor is guilty. Should women deny their freedoms so that they avoid cruel men? If we always let the cruelty of the world dictate our actions, we would not be mourning the loss of the great Nelson Mandela, who believed in love over hatred. We would not celebrate Rosa Parks, who was tired in every sense of the word. We would have a history that would include Adolph Hitler's victory and Nellie McClung's defeat. But we didn't tolerate that. Let's be a culture that looks back in 50 years at the way we handled discussions on sexual assault and be proud. Don't settle. Don't accept. Do what Dworkin insisted upon. I will say it again:

"It is incumbent upon each of us to be the woman that Marc Lepine wanted to kill. We must live with this honour, this courage. We must drive out fear. We must hold on. We must create. We must resist."