Remembering Women Murdered by Men

Women are murdered by men in Canada every day in horrific numbers: from the approximately 500 Aboriginal women missing and murdered in Canada over the past 20 years, to the 14 women murdered at l'Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989, to the everyday acts of femicide, so commonplace and often so casual that they barely make the news. Feminist memorializing of women victims of violence is a key part in preventing those murders from becoming mere numbers or being denied. Beyond the December 6 memorials, there are over 30 permanent monuments built in cities across Canada. The authors identify where these monuments can be found, who they remember, and the communities that built them. The importance of this book is that it speaks to these acts of remembering b providing context for how women are remembered, and why remembering them is so important.

...Collectively written by five academics and community activists, the book examines how murdered Canadian women have been memorialized. More than a description of a statue here or a plaque there, Remembering Women Murdered by Men explores the processes by which public monuments were created, the obstacles they faced, the ways in which they name or gloss over violence against women and the attributes they project upon victims. The history of these memorials becomes a metaphoric inquiry into societal attitudes towards femicide and a moving examination of collective memory-making...

... The Cultural Memory Group... speak with one articulate and passionate voice. Supplementary materials by guest Aboriginal writers expand the scope of the discussion to include women often victimized, yet rarely hard...

...[an] important addition to the canon of Canadian feminist scholarship...

In the book Remembering Women Murdered by Men, The Cultural Memory Group attempts to provide a voice for the millions of victims of femicide. The book illustrates the hard work and dedication involved in each monument. Despite public qualms, each memorial was brought into existence though a cooperation of grassroots political groups, local artisans, community volunteers and government officials. They are beautiful works of art that serve as a powerful reminder of gender inequalities. While the monuments turn public spaces into private places for reflection, the book acknowledges that monuments alone do not always inspire activism. Much work is needed in the form of public awareness and education.

If you are interested in women's issues, read this book. It is informative and well written. Pick it up, take a look, and then share it with a friend. In order to eliminate violence against women, we must first acknowledge it. Reading a book like this is a step in the right direction.

When it comes to memorializing women murdered by men, how do individuals and communities balance the tension between the need to remember, the desire to forget and the yearning for an end to violence against women? Remembering Women Murdered by Men: Memorials Across Canada is a significant analysis of more than 30 such memorials and the needs, desires and yearnings that brought them into existence, often despite compelling odds and seemingly monumental challenges.

The Cultural Memory Group has accomplished much in this book, creating a literary memorial that is both historic and dense with social significance about the complexities of collective memory making. It mourns the women who were murdered and serves as a testament to the commitment of those moved to take action.

From their collective academic, research, social justice and front line violence against women (VAW) experiences, the authors researched and analyzed the purpose of each memorial and examined the complex processes of planning, decision-making, negotiating and financing associated with their creation.

The authors explicitly favour 'feminist memorializing' that expects VAW memorials to be activist in nature, impacting public policy makers and provoking individual and collective action. However, they do not minimize the inherent value of those memorials which, either by intent or compromise, do not fulfill an activist purpose.

Remembering Women Murdered by Men is rich in reflections and observations that are both subtle and transparent. Through their own collective voice and the words of others, the Cultural Memory Group asks questions and shares public and private statements about memorializing that soothe, simmer and provoke.

It's clear that the composition of the community that creates a memorial undertaking influences everything about it: its purpose, use, design, symbolism, location, and inscriptions. The book demonstrates how participatory memorial making can consolidate a community in a show of unity or divide it as the process unveils conflicting values and intolerance.

The challenge quoted by a Montreal journalist during the creation of the City of Montreal's memorial to the 14 women murdered at L'Ecole Polytechnique is common: 'Relatives, police and university and city officials, though united in shock and mourning, could not always agree on how or what to remember.'

Should a community be inclusive in the process or as in one community 'move fast before controversy could gather?' Inviting public consultation amounted to inviting backlash and risked the demise of some memorials.

Memorials were found in very public places where they touched the lives of those who entered their space. They served as sites for vigils and ceremonies while being targeted with vandalism and anger. Some were found tucked away in quiet places which on one hand was ideal for individual contemplation and mourning and on the other an excuse to hid femicide from society's public view.

Memorials have taken the form of boulders, polished granite, benches, work tables, trees, art, plaques, gardens, sculptures, walkways and sophisticated monuments to satisfy symbolism, budget (between $500 and $300,000) and compromise. Each memorial in the book is described in meticulous detail.

The authors analyzed and critiqued the language of the memorials, the naming of victims, the declaration of gendered violence, the recognition of sponsors and the words of dedication on the inscriptions as they are 'potentially their most explicitly consciousness-raising feature'.

An engaging element of Remembering Women Murdered by Men is the Cultural Memory Group's transparency in its own processes: 'Working within a feminist research collective is slower, more arduous, more challenging, more companionable and ultimately more rewarding than working alone as each unspoken assumption is interrogated, each procedure, practice and phrase is subject to scrutiny, and each observation raises the stakes and level of discourse.'

They also displayed an effort to be sensitive to 'difference and differential power across race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and ability.'

Recognizing that 'the feminist perspective that drives our analysis does not necessarily translate across cultural difference', the authors respectfully invited First Nations Women to voice their own memorials within the pages of the book.

Remembering Women Murdered by Men serves as both a bold reality check for anyone contemplating a memorial in their community and an inspiration to guide a community in its own meaningful memory making.

Remembering Women Murdered by Men is an ominous title, threatening to give special tragic significance to victims according to the gender of the murderer. The Cultural Memory Group's record of memorials across Canada never fully escapes this shadow, but it does pose interesting questions about cultural memory and forgetfulness. Violence threatens different social groups with different levels of force; women are more vulnerable than men, and women in poverty are more vulnerable than women with wealth, and these are the groups whose loss is all too often invisible. Public memorials carry a political significance, and the Cultural Memory Group, a team of researchers dedicated to collaborative and interdisciplinary explorations of how memories are either sustained or repressed within a culture, aims to keep the crucial memory alive that this woman, at this time, in this context, was deprived of life, and that any particular case can be seen to represent thousands of others. The memorial then becomes a public statement of appreciation and protest.

Countering expectations that a public memorial glorifies greatness, the authors' emphasis here is on the ordinary, whether the victims are the 500 Aboriginal women murdered in Canada over the past twenty years, or the fourteen women murdered in Montreal in December 1989, or the sixty-nine so-called "missing women" from Vancouver's downtown Eastside. Naming victims provides a public record, but the authors rightly insist that no edifice or space or service can do all the memory work for us. Some memorials ask the viewer to piece various elements together, thereby demanding a participation that exercises the power of imagination and naming; some offer spaces of rest; some disorient the viewer, highlighting fear and helplessness.

The book would have been strengthened had these Canadian memorials of women murdered by men been linked to other efforts at breaking convenient silences, whether of the missing masses in 1970s Chile, or the struggles by the White House to suppress images of coffins returning from Iraq. The real body count is always a political issue; Remembering Women Murdered by Men reminds us that violent loss takes place within a cultural context, and should be so marked.