While walking on the campus of the University of Toronto last week I came across a plaque with the following inscription:
These fourteen trees are with sorrow planted in memory and in honour of fourteen sisters slain because of their gender in Montreal on December 6, 1989. May commitment to the eradication of sexism and violence against women be likewise planted in the hearts and minds of you who stand here now and of all who come after. It is not enough to look back in pain. We must create a new future...
My first thought was, "Their poor mother--to lose all of them at once!" My second was, "Ought I to be so insensitive?" My third was: "Yes."
The event or events were no doubt tragic, but the plaque is comic and tendentious. Note that it does not mention the names of the fourteen women who died. They are not commemorated as individual people, but as the excuse for a plaque. It is not even clear which of the many trees and bushes near the plaque are the fourteen commemorative trees, and nobody put little markers with a person's name on each, as anybody intending a real memorial would have done. Nor do we know what happened in 1989, or what the connection is between deaths in Montreal and memorials in Toronto.
. Instead, a notice tells us that the memorial was created by "Women won't forget" on December 6, 1990. The true message is "Feminists had enough influence in 1990 to get a plaque with their buzzwords and some trees put here." The dead women are merely an excuse for that message.
UPDATE, September 29. I thank Lynn Recker for pointing me towards the story of the Montreal Massacre.
In all 14 women died. Thirteen were engineering students and one was a school secretary, almost all were in their 20s:
Lepine, 25, first killed a woman in the corridor. He then walked into a classroom and ordered the men to stand separately from the women. The men were then forced to leave. Shouting "I hate feminists," Lepine killed six women. He then left the classroom and roamed the halls killing seven more women before turning the rifle on himself.
Apparently, Lepine thought he should have been granted admission to the engineering school instead of the women. Thus, a different and equally tendentious memorial might have said "Here is a memorial to fourteen women who died because of affirmative action" or "Here is a memorial to fourteen women who died because they weren't carrying weapons." Those would be as bad as the feminist memorial.
It's not too long a story to put on a memorial, I think. As Avery Katz, Lynn Recker, and Ookdalibrarian point out to me in their good emails, I could have done some investigating and found the story, and Canadians who followed the news in 1989 will remember it. It is true that a memorial can be designed just for those who already know the story, as gravestones commonly are. But as it is, the events of 1989 are equally uncommemorated to foreigners and to students who pass by without having read the newspapers of 14 years earlier. And even for those who do know, the message is one primarily about feminism, not murder victims.
Were the thirteen engineering students and the secretary feminists? I don't know. I'd guess feminists wouldn't be interested in engineering. But apparently some people thought, as I do, that feminists were callously using their deaths to make political statements. From the same article:
The debate was particularly fierce in Quebec where women's groups were accused of taking advantage of the massacre for their own political purposes....
... Women's groups argued that this was an extreme example of the violence women face every day. Others argued that it was the single act of a madman and had little to do with the issue of violence against women.
You won't find the names of the victims on the U. of T. campus. But here they are for you and I to see.
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 Maria Klueznick
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