We became feminists on that day: in a quiet, dangerous, deeply religious sense: the sense intended by the Psalmist when he angrily declares: “Ye that love the LORD, hate evil.”
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“You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.” —Marc Lépine, 25-year-old misogynist who murdered 14 women in the Montreal Massacre
Anne-Marie Edward was a John Abbott College student who got into UdM’s prestigious engineering school, École Polytechnique.Though I was just fifteen, I’ll never forget the day she was murdered: it was December 6, 1989
My enthusiasm for Pentecostalism was fading, Susan and I were getting serious, and I was already in trouble at Argyle Academy. I had a black eye and two broken fingers from an LD dance fistfight, which I won.
I was laying on my bed when I got the news, listening to U2’s “Drowning Man” in my tropical Galt Street bedroom.
Something youthful and beautiful died in us that day: an innocence, a naïveté, a sweet faith in the inherent goodness of the world. It was a defining moment for my generation, a Conversion on the Road to Damascus.
We became feminists on that day. Not in a showy, self-righteous, politically-correct sense. But in a quiet, dangerous, deeply religious once-I-was-blind-but-now-I-see sense, the sense intended by the Psalmist when he angrily declares: “Ye that love the LORD, hate evil.”
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2015)
Originally published at Committing Sociology. Reprinted with permission.
Photo Credit: The Anne-Marie Edward Building (John Abbott College). Courtesy of the author.
Well, you got the religious part right