On Dec 6, 1989, Marc Lepine walked into a classroom at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and ordered the women to separate themselves from the men. Then he let the men out of the room, shouted, “I hate feminists,” and shot every woman in the classroom.
Francine Pelletier was a columnist for La Presse at the time. There were fights in newsrooms about how to cover the issue of a sexist crime; and while some women wanted to talk about the issue, many men backed away from in-depth coverage.
Some refused to see the shootings as a crime against women. Pelletier thought differently. Ten years after the Montreal massacre, she created a documentary for her then-employer, The Fifth Estate.
“I started looking into it and realized that it takes years to make a documentary like that. The only way I could treat the subject correctly was to pitch it to The Fifth Estate,” she says.
Pelletier served as the Irving Chair in Journalism until Friday at St. Thomas University. She showed the documentary on campus Wednesday.
While there had been two documentaries created about the massacre before her piece, Pellietier, as both a feminist and a journalist, felt the whole story needed to be told.
“We had not said enough. This was one of the first overtly sexist crimes in history. There’ve been tons of racist crimes – people who have been killed for the colour of their skin or for their religious beliefs – but really, have there been overt crimes where we say ‘I’m killing you because you’re a woman’?”
Ten years after the Fifth Estate episode, Pelletier tried to get funding for a new documentary, revisiting the massacre. It was rejected by Radio Canada and the National Film Board.
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Pelletier has worked in print, radio, and television. Though a veteran journalist by the time she worked with The Fifth Estate, she wasn’t safe from the primping, painting, and posturing women in television are often subjected to.
“They offered me a shopper. Someone who buys you clothes. I said, ‘are you kidding?’ Already you have to have a jacket, certain things that look a certain way. There was pressure. They do too much of the makeup. The makeup and the hair is way over the top. It’s not me,” she says.
While being interviewed for this piece, Pelletier wears a green tweed pantsuit, very comfortable, very professional. She pushes her grey hair back with little regard for its curling around her ears, or for the glasses perched atop her head.
While showing her documentary at St. Thomas, Pelletier sports her usual uniform: a tailored outfit, hair a little unkempt, her glasses perched atop her head. She introduces her film.
As the lights go down in the room, and The Fifth Estate credits spring to the screen, the audience is transported back to the late 1990s. Pelletier appears on screen, but here she’s a different version of herself. Over a decade younger, yes, but more made up. Her hair is perfectly coiffed. Her eyes are made up dramatically, and her navy blazer projects the perfect mix of authority and style. She is sombre, but most importantly, she is beautiful.
“I must say that it’s certainly part of the stuff that didn’t make me want to stick around The Fifth Estate, because I had, like most people, such an admiration for the show, and people.”
Still, the pretense bothered Pelletier. As a journalist, she wanted to cover the issues, not smile prettily for the cameras just to get ratings. She’s a journalist and a feminist who believes women need to be taken more seriously, especially on television. She points to Quebec journalist Chantal Hebert as a good example of someone who has shunned the beauty queen image, yet succeeded.
“Chantal Hebert refuses to wear makeup, she barely combs her hair. She’s great, because she allows herself to be ‘this is me, you take me as I am.’ It’s a service to all women to be able to do that, and not always say we have to look just so.”
While Hebert has made a name for herself through hard work and not cosmetics, it’s difficult to do. Credibility is still an issue. It’s rare to see a woman sitting at a television news desk without an older male at her side. Many of these women look eerily similar.
And while good-looking people make for watchable television, isn’t it the words they’re saying that are important?
“It’s very hard to resist the television look,” says Pelletier.
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Pelletier sits back in her chair, in the middle of her office high atop a campus where the majority of students are female. She clasps her hands. No, the slate isn’t clean, she says. The glass ceiling may be broken, but it’s not shattered yet.
And not just on-air persona is affected by gender bias. Women make up half the population, but more than 50 per cent of the faces on the nightly news remain men. Of course, it’s also risky to air women’s issues on TV, especially issues that hit close to home, she says.
“Everything that has to do, for example, with Muslim women and their horrible treatment – that is treated beautifully by the media. It’s as if all the problems are over there, but when it’s our problems: let’s move on to something else.”
But isn’t journalism supposed to be unbiased? A feminist slant to the nightly news may not be well received, but it may not be appropriate either. Journalists aren’t supposed to be Marxist, or capitalist, or feminist.
But they’re supposed to have ideas.
“You have to have ideas in your head. It doesn’t mean you have to be unfair; it’s just a way to help you analyse situations,” says Pelletier.
“I think you have to keep on saying ‘what about women?’”
