More on Ecole Polytechnique and Lepine

Dear Abbot:

Memorializing the women of Montreal [shot by Marc Lepine at the Ecole Polytechnique in a famous incident in 1989] is like mourning freed slaves who were murdered after the [US] Civil War for being uppity - for taking employment from whites. I think that helps contextualize this. Should we not particularly mark and mourn lives lost in that particular struggle, versus the lives lost say by Confederate soldiers?

New Man


Dear New:

Good that you brought up the parallel with the civil rights struggle in the US South. I think this is historically crucial, because modern feminism arose at the time of this struggle, in the Sixties, and, I think, based its claim of the oppression of women on perceived analogies with the condition of blacks in the US South.

So it probably really does matter whether we see those claimed parallels as valid or not.

Now let's look at the specific one you raise here: the lynchings of blacks versus the killing of women at EP. Are they comparable?

This from “History of Lynching in the United States” (http://www.umass.edu/complit/aclanet/ACLAText/USLynch.html)

"The lynching era encompasses roughly the five decades between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Great Depression. During these years we may estimate that there were 2,018 separate incidents of lynching in which at least 2,462 African-American men, women and children met their deaths in the grasp of southern mobs, comprised mostly of whites.”

That’s 2,018 separate incidents, involving mobs, in addition to church burnings and murders of blacks by other means. It seems to me a stretch to see that as equivalent to one act by a lone gunman.

In fact, the early suffragists went to some lengths to try to get themselves killed in their cause--throwing themselves in front of carriages and so forth--and rarely succeeded. I do not think blacks in the US South had such difficulties getting themselves lynched.

Another interesting parallel occurs to me, because I am living now in the United Arab Emirates, where older traditions prevail. You may recall that the civil rights struggle was largely set off by Rosa Parks trying to sit at the front of a bus.

But in places where segregation by sex is practiced, it is the women who sit in the front of the bus; the men must move to the back. And it is the men who must yield seats to the women in case of shortage.

If, therefore, the parallel is taken as valid, it shows women to be the ruling group, and men to be oppressed. Either that, or blacks were the ruling elite in the US South.

But to answer your specific question: I believe Confederate soldiers should be remembered, and honourably. As I understand it, few of them believed that they were fighting to defend slavery.

To remember the death of a black man, because he is black, more than the death of a white man, because he is white, is racist. To remember the death of a woman, because she is a woman, more than the death of a man, because he is a man, is sexist.

And to say that these women at EP died as martyrs to the feminist cause, is to give the event Marc Lepine's interpretation, and so promote his views. It is not a proper memorial to those women in any case.