December 6
Dec. 6th, 2003 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ciroccojQuiet day. Sent off my brother, dropped off the boys at Day Camp, and now I'm studying Property.
I think we'll do something with the boys tonight to mark December 6th. It's hard to believe it's been 14 years. Doesn't seem that far away.
I always wonder what the women who were killed that day would have been doing now if they had lived. Most of them were in their early twenties, finishing engineering degrees; two were giving their final dissertation that day. By now I suppose most of them would have been working in their field, maybe married, with kids. Instead they're names that many of us read every December 6th, reminding us of so much that we'd sometimes really rather forget.
Geneviève Bergeron
Hélène Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Barbara Klucznik Widajewicz
Maryse Laganière
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michèle Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Found two very old articles written around the time of the massacre... re-reading them, it makes me wonder how much has really changed.
The following article, originally published in The Globe on Dec. 9, 1989, was last month awarded the English-language Robertine Barry prize by the Ottawa-based Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. The award is given annually for the best feminist article or column in the popular print media.
Our Daughters, Ourselves
BY STEVIE CAMERON
They are so precious to us, our daughters. When they are born we see their futures as unlimited, and as they grow and learn we try so hard to protect them: This is how we cross the street, hold my hand, wear your boots, don't talk to strangers, run to the neighbours if a man tries to get you in his car.
We tell our bright, shining girls that they can be anything: firefighters, doctors, policewomen, lawyers, scientists, soldiers, athletes, artists. What we don’t tell them, yet, is how hard it will be. Maybe, we say to ourselves, by the time they’re older it will be easier for them than it was for us.
But as they grow and learn, with aching hearts we have to start dealing with their bewilderment about injustice. Why do the boys get the best gyms, the best equipment and the best times on the field? Most of the school sports budget? Why does football matter more than gymnastics? Why are most of the teachers women and most of the principals men? Why do boys make more money at their part-time jobs than we do?
And as they grow and learn we have to go on trying to protect them: We'll pick you up at the subway, we'll fetch you from the movie, stay with the group, make sure the parents drive you home from babysitting, don't walk across the park alone, lock the house if we're not there.
It's not fair, they say, Boys can walk where they want, come in when they want, work where they want. Not really, we say; boys get attacked too. But boys are not targets for men the way girls are, so girls have to be more careful.
Sometimes our girls don't make it. Sometimes, despite our best efforts and all our love, they go on drugs, drop out, screw up. On the whole, however, our daughters turn into interesting, delightful people. They plan for college and university, and with wonder and pride we see them competing with the boys for spaces in engineering schools, medical schools, law schools, business schools. For them we dream of Rhodes scholarships, Harvard graduate school, gold medals; sometimes, we even dare to say these words out loud and our daughters reward us with indulgent hugs. Our message is that anything is possible.
We bite back the cautions that we feel we should give them; maybe by the time they’ve graduated, things will have changed, we say to ourselves. Probably by the time they’re out, they will make partner when the men do, be asked to join the same clubs, run for political office. Perhaps they’ll even be able to tee off at the same time men do at the golf course.
Be we still warn them: park close to the movie, get a deadbolt for your apartment, check your windows, tell your roommates where you are. Call me. Call me.
And then with aching hearts we take our precious daughters to lunch and listen to them talk about their friends: the one who was beaten by her boy friend and then shunned by his friends when she asked for help from the dean; the one who was attacked in the parking lot; the one who gets obscene and threatening calls from a boy in her residence; the one who gets raped on a date; the one who was mocked by the male students in the public meeting.
They tell us about the sexism they're discovering in the adult world at university. Women professors who can’t get jobs, who can’t get tenure. Male professors who cannot comprehend women's stony silence after sexist jokes. An administration that only pays lip service to women’s issues and refuses to accept the reality of physical danger to women on campes.
They tell us they’re talking among themselves about how men are demanding rights over unborn children; it’s not old dinosaurs who go to court to prevent a woman’s abortion, it's young men. It's young men, they with disbelief, their own generation, their own buddies with good education, from "nice" families, who are abusive.
What can we say to our bright and shining daughters? How can we tell them how much we hurt to see them developing the same scars we've carried? How much we wanted it to be different for them? It's all about power, we say to them. Sharing power is not easy for anyone and men do not find it easy to share among themselves, much less with a group of equally talented, able women. So men make all those stupid cracks about needing a sex-change operation to get a job or a promotion and they wind up believing it.
Now our daughters have been shocked to the core, as we all have, by the violence in Montreal. They hear the women were separated from the men and meticulously slaughtered by a man who blamed feminists for his troubles. They ask themselves why nobody was able to help the terrified women, to somehow stop the hunter as he roamed the engineering building.
So now our daughters are truly frightened and it makes their mothers furious that they are frightened. They survived all the childhood dangers, they were careful as we trained them to be, they worked hard. Anything was possible and our daughters proved it. And now they are more scared than they were when they were little girls.
Fourteen of our bright and shining daughters won places in engineering schools, doing things we, their mothers, only dreamed of. That we lost them has broken our hearts; what is worse is that we are not surprised.
Stevie Cameron is a former reporter with the Globe and Mail. She is now a co-host of CBS-TV’s current affairs program The Fifth Estate.
We Mourn
...all our daughters
By JAMES QUIG
of the Gazette
They were killed in action.
They died in a war.
We would have cheered them in the streets of Prague and Berlin.
But they chipped away at a much older wall.
They wanted to be more than sugar and spice and everything nice.
They wanted to be engineers.
Like Martin Luther King, they had a dream.
That was their only weapon: a dream.
He killed them for it.
They were the daughters of a revolution. Whether they wanted it or not. Whether they knew it or not.
All of them. All our daughters. Those who died and those they left behind.
Our daughters want their share. That dream made them Marc Lepine's enemy.
"But he was sick," good men will say.
Of course he was sick! Of course all men don't think like that!
But let good men not hide. Let us not look the other way.
There were no men on Marc Lepine's hit list and good men must look harder to find the reason why.
Men abuse women. Men throw the punches. Men pull the trigger. Men build the walls.
And only men can end it.
Why is violence against women the domain of women?
How did a man's fist in a woman's face ever get to be a woman’s issue?
Why do civilized men continue to hurt the women they love?
"Be calm," a young man told an angry young woman at the vigil for the victims the other night.
He was wrong. This is no time for calm. This is a time for anger. Men's anger. This is not a job for the women's groups, not just another beef for women's lib.
Our daughters are afraid of us.
If ever there was a time to say it: This is a job for men. When will we act? When will we care?
They are brave, these daughters who suffer for their father's sins.
They blow holes in our walls with guts and hard work instead of guns.
Brave at home, brave at school, brave at the office.
"Sorry, Dad, but that's not the way I feel.
"That's not the way it is any more."
They chip away. For the right to move in with him, for better jobs, equal pay and care for their babies.
Brave enough to mean no when they say no.
Brave enough to fight back. Brave enough to want more and do more.
Brave enough to be mothers, housewives - or engineers.
That's what our daughters are made of.
So close we didn't notice. So near we didn't cheer.
I think we'll do something with the boys tonight to mark December 6th. It's hard to believe it's been 14 years. Doesn't seem that far away.
I always wonder what the women who were killed that day would have been doing now if they had lived. Most of them were in their early twenties, finishing engineering degrees; two were giving their final dissertation that day. By now I suppose most of them would have been working in their field, maybe married, with kids. Instead they're names that many of us read every December 6th, reminding us of so much that we'd sometimes really rather forget.
Hélène Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Barbara Klucznik Widajewicz
Maryse Laganière
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michèle Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Found two very old articles written around the time of the massacre... re-reading them, it makes me wonder how much has really changed.
The following article, originally published in The Globe on Dec. 9, 1989, was last month awarded the English-language Robertine Barry prize by the Ottawa-based Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. The award is given annually for the best feminist article or column in the popular print media.
Our Daughters, Ourselves
BY STEVIE CAMERON
They are so precious to us, our daughters. When they are born we see their futures as unlimited, and as they grow and learn we try so hard to protect them: This is how we cross the street, hold my hand, wear your boots, don't talk to strangers, run to the neighbours if a man tries to get you in his car.
We tell our bright, shining girls that they can be anything: firefighters, doctors, policewomen, lawyers, scientists, soldiers, athletes, artists. What we don’t tell them, yet, is how hard it will be. Maybe, we say to ourselves, by the time they’re older it will be easier for them than it was for us.
But as they grow and learn, with aching hearts we have to start dealing with their bewilderment about injustice. Why do the boys get the best gyms, the best equipment and the best times on the field? Most of the school sports budget? Why does football matter more than gymnastics? Why are most of the teachers women and most of the principals men? Why do boys make more money at their part-time jobs than we do?
And as they grow and learn we have to go on trying to protect them: We'll pick you up at the subway, we'll fetch you from the movie, stay with the group, make sure the parents drive you home from babysitting, don't walk across the park alone, lock the house if we're not there.
It's not fair, they say, Boys can walk where they want, come in when they want, work where they want. Not really, we say; boys get attacked too. But boys are not targets for men the way girls are, so girls have to be more careful.
Sometimes our girls don't make it. Sometimes, despite our best efforts and all our love, they go on drugs, drop out, screw up. On the whole, however, our daughters turn into interesting, delightful people. They plan for college and university, and with wonder and pride we see them competing with the boys for spaces in engineering schools, medical schools, law schools, business schools. For them we dream of Rhodes scholarships, Harvard graduate school, gold medals; sometimes, we even dare to say these words out loud and our daughters reward us with indulgent hugs. Our message is that anything is possible.
We bite back the cautions that we feel we should give them; maybe by the time they’ve graduated, things will have changed, we say to ourselves. Probably by the time they’re out, they will make partner when the men do, be asked to join the same clubs, run for political office. Perhaps they’ll even be able to tee off at the same time men do at the golf course.
Be we still warn them: park close to the movie, get a deadbolt for your apartment, check your windows, tell your roommates where you are. Call me. Call me.
And then with aching hearts we take our precious daughters to lunch and listen to them talk about their friends: the one who was beaten by her boy friend and then shunned by his friends when she asked for help from the dean; the one who was attacked in the parking lot; the one who gets obscene and threatening calls from a boy in her residence; the one who gets raped on a date; the one who was mocked by the male students in the public meeting.
They tell us about the sexism they're discovering in the adult world at university. Women professors who can’t get jobs, who can’t get tenure. Male professors who cannot comprehend women's stony silence after sexist jokes. An administration that only pays lip service to women’s issues and refuses to accept the reality of physical danger to women on campes.
They tell us they’re talking among themselves about how men are demanding rights over unborn children; it’s not old dinosaurs who go to court to prevent a woman’s abortion, it's young men. It's young men, they with disbelief, their own generation, their own buddies with good education, from "nice" families, who are abusive.
What can we say to our bright and shining daughters? How can we tell them how much we hurt to see them developing the same scars we've carried? How much we wanted it to be different for them? It's all about power, we say to them. Sharing power is not easy for anyone and men do not find it easy to share among themselves, much less with a group of equally talented, able women. So men make all those stupid cracks about needing a sex-change operation to get a job or a promotion and they wind up believing it.
Now our daughters have been shocked to the core, as we all have, by the violence in Montreal. They hear the women were separated from the men and meticulously slaughtered by a man who blamed feminists for his troubles. They ask themselves why nobody was able to help the terrified women, to somehow stop the hunter as he roamed the engineering building.
So now our daughters are truly frightened and it makes their mothers furious that they are frightened. They survived all the childhood dangers, they were careful as we trained them to be, they worked hard. Anything was possible and our daughters proved it. And now they are more scared than they were when they were little girls.
Fourteen of our bright and shining daughters won places in engineering schools, doing things we, their mothers, only dreamed of. That we lost them has broken our hearts; what is worse is that we are not surprised.
Stevie Cameron is a former reporter with the Globe and Mail. She is now a co-host of CBS-TV’s current affairs program The Fifth Estate.
We Mourn
...all our daughters
By JAMES QUIG
of the Gazette
They were killed in action.
They died in a war.
We would have cheered them in the streets of Prague and Berlin.
But they chipped away at a much older wall.
They wanted to be more than sugar and spice and everything nice.
They wanted to be engineers.
Like Martin Luther King, they had a dream.
That was their only weapon: a dream.
He killed them for it.
They were the daughters of a revolution. Whether they wanted it or not. Whether they knew it or not.
All of them. All our daughters. Those who died and those they left behind.
Our daughters want their share. That dream made them Marc Lepine's enemy.
"But he was sick," good men will say.
Of course he was sick! Of course all men don't think like that!
But let good men not hide. Let us not look the other way.
There were no men on Marc Lepine's hit list and good men must look harder to find the reason why.
Men abuse women. Men throw the punches. Men pull the trigger. Men build the walls.
And only men can end it.
Why is violence against women the domain of women?
How did a man's fist in a woman's face ever get to be a woman’s issue?
Why do civilized men continue to hurt the women they love?
"Be calm," a young man told an angry young woman at the vigil for the victims the other night.
He was wrong. This is no time for calm. This is a time for anger. Men's anger. This is not a job for the women's groups, not just another beef for women's lib.
Our daughters are afraid of us.
If ever there was a time to say it: This is a job for men. When will we act? When will we care?
They are brave, these daughters who suffer for their father's sins.
They blow holes in our walls with guts and hard work instead of guns.
Brave at home, brave at school, brave at the office.
"Sorry, Dad, but that's not the way I feel.
"That's not the way it is any more."
They chip away. For the right to move in with him, for better jobs, equal pay and care for their babies.
Brave enough to mean no when they say no.
Brave enough to fight back. Brave enough to want more and do more.
Brave enough to be mothers, housewives - or engineers.
That's what our daughters are made of.
So close we didn't notice. So near we didn't cheer.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 12:20 pm (UTC)I'm certainly interested in knowing what happened.
Thanks so much, hon.
I hope you don't think I'm a jerk because I don't know already.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 12:26 pm (UTC)Oh, god no - it was 14 years ago, and not in the US. It's still remembered here because the gov made December 6th a day of rememberance, and there are vigils held in many Canadian cities. I wouldn't expect anybody else to remember it - sadly, there's too many massacres around the world to keep them all straight.
http://archives.cbc.ca/300c.asp?IDCat=70&IDDos=398&IDLan=1&IDMenu=70
http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2000/12/06/massacre001206
no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 03:15 pm (UTC)I'm glad you posted something...I'd forgotten the date of the massacre. I had never heard of it until you said something last year, and I'm still horrified.
Beautiful articles, though. Especially that first one.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 03:50 pm (UTC)Be well, Jim!
no subject
Date: 2003-12-06 05:24 pm (UTC)I had no idea either of you even read this.
Hi!