An Olin Engineering student, Tim Smith '09, posted this message about the Montreal Massacre on the Wellesley Community message board today. Rather than re-write my own opinions on the event with snippits of his writing, I wanted to share his original writing with you, his voice is unique on this issue and his words are incredibly moving:

Seventeen years ago today (12/6/1989), Marc Lepine walked into an engineering classroom at the University of Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique. Waving a rifle, he ordered the men out of the room and, shouting "You're women, you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of fucking feminists. I hate feminists," began firing at the women in the classroom. Fourteen women were killed and another thirteen people (including four men) were injured before Lepine turned his gun on himself twenty minutes later. A part-time EMT studying at the school who was deeply affected by the attacks later committed suicide, followed by his parents.

A note on Lepine's body included a "hit list" of nineteen prominent Canadian women, whom he labeled as "radical feminists". Few if any of the women were "professional" or academic feminists or even remotely controversial; rather, they had dared to succeed visibly, which was enough to condemn them in Lepine's eyes.

Lepine had been rejected from the l'Ecole Polytechnique and chose (apparently without justification) to blame gender-based affirmative action. Lepine's madness could have taken any number of forms and he could have siezed upon any number of perceived injustices. That he chose to rage particularly at women engineers perhaps suggests that the presence of women in engineering was particularly offensive to him. Lepine knew who ought to become engineers, and he knew that women shouldn't. If Lepine, like all of us, was a product of the culture that raised him, it suggests disappointing things about our readiness to accept women in technical and professional capacities and highlights that women pursuing engineering frequently face uphill battles.

I'm posting this tonight because the Massacre has been haunting me as I went through my classes today, both for its horrifying violence and Lepine's absolute, deadly certainty about who belonged and who didn't belong in engineering. I'd never heard about it until a few days ago, when an article about the Massacre was assigned for a Gender and Engineering discussion group I'm a member of here at Olin. One professor, who in 1989 was studying engineering at the University of Toronto, talked about how deeply it had disturbed her and her peers. I think I can see why.

If there's a silver lining, it lies in the Quebecois response to the tragedy. The families of the victims launched a successful campaign to tighten gun laws, and in 1990 the Canadian Parliament recognized the massacre as symptomatic of a larger societal problem by officially designating December 6 the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. In the five years after the massacre, female registrations at l'Ecole Polytechnique increased 7%.

It's bizarre and unsettling to realize that, as I neared my third birthday, fourteen women were murdered because they were doing what I'm doing here today. I'd just like to take a moment to recognize the injustice and absurdity of that loss and to hope -- and act -- for a brighter tomorrow.

[posted with permission of Tim]