I meant to post this yesterday, but literally didn't know what day it was.
December 6th, 1989, was a profoundly sad day for our community, here in Québec, when an anti-feminist man entered the engineering school of Polytechnique in Montreal with a firearm with the intention of killing as many "feminists" as he could.
The shooter entered a classroom at the end of a corridor, ordered all the men out and then shot the girls. He then went out and kept shooting women on sight before killing himself. That man murdered fourteen women, in cold blood, and why ? Basically because he was angry that men were "denied" places in engineering schools since those places were being taken by more competent girls, who in his opinion should have gone back to the kitchen to be housewives like his beloved mother was.
I was born in that same city a year later, and I can testify to the profound trauma that was left on our community by that femicide, and attest to the fact that it has made many women feminists.
I am sharing this because of how close it still is to my heart, but also because the thirtieth anniversary last year was a peaking moment for me.
Indeed, the Women's Federation of Quebec had a man as president (he claims to be a lesbian and has breast implants) for a couple of years. Last year, after making disgusting comments about how he wanted feminism (and the federation) to be less oriented towards the needs of women and more towards the needs of everyone who "identifies as a woman", he attempted to plan a series of events to sensibilize the public to the realities of TIMs during the commemoration week of the femicide... And even though I myself was still somewhat of a TRA at that time, I got called transphobic and a terf for saying that the events of Poly had nothing to do with TIMs.
The event was also co-opted by Morgane Oger, who attempted to appropriate our trauma by claiming that he, "as a woman" in an engineering school at the time, had been terrified that he might be next... Even though he didn't begin to appropriate womanhood until over twenty years later unless I'm mistaken and noone, least of all an angry MRA, would ever have mistaken him for a woman in 1989 (and probably wouldn't now either).
Those fourteen women were not murdered because they identified as women. The one survivor from the classroom even stated to the shooter that she wasn't a feminist. This shooter did not care about their gender identity or expression. This shooter wanted them dead because they were females who refused to be subordinates. Period.
And we must remember that, and that men have no business appropriating our literal murders.
(And right as I was finishing this post a literal TIF walked in and cheerfully said hi. Damn timing lol...)
it was 2016 that the new £5 note was released into circulation with the image of Winston Churchill on the reverse, replacing the previous £5 note that featured the image of Elizabeth Fry, that alone amazes me about how quickly we forget.
Ah right... I'd forgotten... When Fry was replaced by Churchill on the fiver, that was when there were no woman on any UK bank notes apart from the queen. That was when the campaign started to get notable women represented on bank notes.
Fry is my hero. I learnt about her as a child as I went to a Quaker school, and was so disappointed when she was removed from the £5 note.
Shes a feminist hero, and yet another example of how history overlooks women who have changed the shape of the modern world.
Everyone is out here fawning over Elon Musk and a million other undeserving silver-spoon moids, while women can literally revolutionise the way we do things and 99% of people couldn't name them.
women can literally revolutionise the way we do things and 99% of people couldn't name them
So much truth!
Its so shameful that we've gone so far backwards in such a short period of time.
all the more an outrage that the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies has turned its back on women...as exposed by the formidable Heather Mason https://twitter.com/Mason134211f/status/1400130437595475975
Just started the the prison mockumentary Hard Cell on Netflix. Catherine Tate gives a shout out to Elizabeth Fry in the first episode!
i'd like to say that I hope that by the 200th anniversary we will have achieved enough to make prisons actually single sex again but I fear that the more realistic option is that by 2023 there will be even more men in women's prisons than ever. :( at least elizabeth isn't around to see the destruction of her life's work. RIP shero
Thanks for the history lesson. She was a really remarkable woman. It is a little chilling to think what it was like for imprisoned women before the changes she insisted be made. Brrr.
Kinda like New Jersey . . .