5 June 2024
Dear Charlotte of 1989:
Congratulations! You have completed your coursework and exams and successfully entered candidacy. It is an impressive achievement. The mantle “ABD”—formally “All But Dissertation,” and informally “All But Done”—is one to wear with pride.
You may be surprised to hear that after all these years, the experience of researching and writing the dissertation you are now starting continues to influence our work. The idea of analyzing and interpreting the experiences women have in their daily lives in order to theorize and construct feminism has become fundamental to your work as a historian. Just as importantly, the idea held by so many of the women who founded feminist theatres—if what you need is not available, then you must create it—has guided every facet of our career. My current laptop is so much more powerful than the IBM Personal Computer XT you are writing the dissertation on, but the work you did and are going to do is with me every day.
The germinal ideas that will shape your work as a historian emerge with the first set of interviews you conduct across a week in December. As valuable as archival and secondary source research were, it was conversations with the artists themselves that inspired you. From Thursday, December 14, 1989, to Wednesday, December 20, 1989, you spoke for hours with playwrights/directors/performers Margot Lewitin, Karen Malpede, Emma Missouri, Helen Krich Chinoy, Twila Thompson, Clare Coss, Roberta Sklar, and Sondra Segal (Canning 211). All but Chinoy and Missouri were in Manhattan, and the compelling experience of each artist encounter made it easy to ignore the exceptionally cold weather that froze you as you went from place to place.
I promise you I haven’t forgotten what framed those December interviews. This letter is not intended as nostalgic reverie. Instead, I want us to wrestle with how to stay committed to hope and productive change when my current historical moment seems not to be fulfilling the potential that you assumed was inevitable. Even though you disavowed then (and now) the idea of teleological progressive change, some part of you could not help but believe that some changes could not be undone, like voting rights or access to abortion. But these achievements can and will be dismantled, devastating you. Contrary to the optimism and excitement you felt in 1989, in 2024 despair will dominate your thoughts. Thinking back to 1989, though, I cannot help but wonder if, in the dissertation, we should have acknowledged more fully the event that preceded the December interviews.
On December 6, 1989, at 5:10 p.m., eight days before the first interview, Marc Lépine entered a classroom in the École Polytechnique de Montréal. He ordered the men and women to separate and the men to leave the room. Despite his being armed with a gun, many assumed this was some kind of prank. But it wasn’t. In less than twenty minutes, he killed fourteen women and wounded many others. In the first classroom, Lépine told the women he was going to kill them because they were feminists. He elaborated in a manifesto he had mailed earlier: “Feminists have always enraged me. . . . I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker” (qtd. in Lindeman). Just before 5:30 p.m., he took his own life. The shooting was international news, and the world expressed disbelief that such an abominable tragedy could occur.
School shootings become horrifically prevalent in the twenty-first century. In 1989, what happened in Montreal was monstrous, in part because of how unprecedented it seemed at the time. The horror came up in every interview you did that week. Alongside expressions of support for those directly affected, each conversation picked its way fearfully through the possible larger implications. Some interviews almost didn’t happen because of their sense that the work they had devoted their lives to creating as artists was threatened or even erased by murderous violence.
The meanings to be derived from historical events are not as simple or reductive as to whether or not they undo things that came before. The terror of December 6, 1989 would spur many productive changes at the local and national level in Canada. Journalist Josée Boileau noted in 2020 that one “positive outcome” of the shooting was that “it took violence against women out of the private sphere where it had previously been confined. It became a public issue” (101). A focus on positive outcomes is an important way to honor the suffering and achievements of our predecessors. Such a focus cannot be in place of reckoning with larger and ongoing patterns of violence and oppression. The failure to do so can make each new event seem exceptional and unique, instead of as a part of larger institutional and systemic structures. As a historian, it is incredibly important that we account for those systems, institutions, and structures as patterns that can be disrupted, changed, and resisted.
I wish you had known how to discuss the conditions of the interviews. We made the mistake of seeing that dreadful event not as part of a larger historical pattern, but as unique and therefore outside the scope of the dissertation. In retrospect, a frame that acknowledged the most recent occurrence of long-standing violence against those who transgress boundaries of sexuality, gender, race, and other identity markers would have offered a more complex and nuanced way of understanding power and resistance. During coursework, you had read an anthology that profoundly shaped your thinking: feminist theorist Teresa De Lauretis’s 1986 Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Historian Linda Gordon rejected the prevailing ideas that positioned women as all too often powerless: “To be less powerful,” she argued, “is not be power-less, or even to lose all the time” (24). In 2024, you are still looking to historicize how the “less powerful” construct their lives, have an impact on their communities, and make their voices heard in the world. That is, we keep writing histories of how the “less powerful” are neither “power-less” or “lose all the time.”
Years from now, when you have been advising students for more than three decades, you will begin all office hour visits the same way: by asking each student, “How can I be helpful to you?” And you mean it. Learning is always difficult, and faculty should be there to help students cope with the barriers that come between students and their goals. I cannot really be helpful to you because, obviously, you cannot read this letter. What I hope for both of us, then, is that there is someone who will, and that they will find our shared past useful and help them make their own way. One of the most important lessons we learned from writing the dissertation and the book that followed was that if you do not see what you need, then you have to make it. Above all, this letter is a testament to the fact that our shared journey makes us who we are. I didn’t forget what happened and carry you with me everywhere. Thank you for the dissertation to come. It will make a book that is useful for so many and set us on an amazing path as a historian.
With love,
Charlotte of 2024
Works Cited
Boileau, Josée. Because They Were Women: The Montreal Massacre. Translated by Chantal Bilodeau, Second Story Press, 2020.
Canning, Charlotte M. Feminist Theatres in the USA: Staging Women’s Experience. Routledge, 1996.
Gordon, Linda. “What’s New in Women’s History?” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, edited by Teresa De Lauretis, Indiana UP, 1986, pp. 20–30.
Lindeman, Tracey. “‘Hate Is Infectious’: How the 1989 Mass Shooting of 14 Women Echoes Today.” The Guardian, 4 Dec. 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/04/mass-shooting-1989-montreal-14-women-killed.