Fourteen young women, murdered because they were women, are memorialized in this definitive account of the tragic day that forced a reckoning with violence against women in our culture. The victims of what became known as the “Montreal Massacre” are remembered, their lives cut short on December 6, 1989 when a man entered École Polytechnique and systematically shot every young woman he encountered. The killer was motivated by a misogyny whose roots go far beyond one man and one day. This book examines how December 6 precipitated an entire cultural shift in thinking around gender-based violence.

Josée Boileau, author of Because They Were Women, has been a journalist for more than thirty years, many of those for Quebec’s Le Devoir newspaper, where she became Editor in Chief. Today, she is a current affairs commentator for CBC/Radio Canada and Chatelaine, and a book columnist for Journal de Montréal. She has received a number of honors, including the Hélène-Pednault prize in recognition of her feminist activism. She lives in Montreal.

Josée Boileau's profile page

Chantal Bilodeau is a Montréal-born, New York-based playwright and translator whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change. She is the founding artistic director of the Arts & Climate Initiative (formerly The Arctic Cycle) and over the past decade has been instrumental in getting the theatre and educational communities, as well as audiences in the US and abroad, to engage in climate action through programming that includes live events, talks, publications, workshops, national and international convenings, and a worldwide-distributed theatre festival. Awards include the Woodward International Playwriting Prize as well as First Prize in the Earth Matters on Stage Ecodrama Playwrights Festival and the Uprising National Playwriting Competition. Her plays and translations have been presented in a dozen countries around the world and she had edited or co-edited three anthologies of short plays about the climate crisis. In 2019, she was named one of “8 Trailblazers Who Are Changing the Climate Conversation” by Audubon Magazine.

Chantal Bilodeau's profile page

It highlights how far Quebec has come in the years since the massacre, which happened at a time when few women would publicly identify themselves as feminists. But just as importantly, it highlights how far there is still left to go.

Herizons Magazine

“Boileau’s approach has the double effect of humanizing that list of names and ages we associate with December 6 and making the reader feel the loss of these young women and their futures all the more keenly.”

December 2020

Ce jour-là’s English publication is important, sharing the mourning across the two colonial language communities, and sharing some sense of agency as well.

Montreal Review of Books