Fourteen young women, murdered because they were women, are memorialized in this definitive account of the tragic day that forced a reckoning with violence against women in our culture. The victims of what became known as the “Montreal Massacre” are remembered, their lives cut short on December 6, 1989 when a man entered École Polytechnique and systematically shot every young woman he encountered. The killer was motivated by a misogyny whose roots go far beyond one man and one day. This book examines how December 6 precipitated an entire cultural shift in thinking around gender-based violence.
“Boileau’s approach has the double effect of humanizing that list of names and ages we associate with December 6 and making the reader feel the loss of these young women and their futures all the more keenly.”
Ce jour-là’s English publication is important, sharing the mourning across the two colonial language communities, and sharing some sense of agency as well.
It highlights how far Quebec has come in the years since the massacre, which happened at a time when few women would publicly identify themselves as feminists. But just as importantly, it highlights how far there is still left to go.