“All my pretty ones? Did you say all? What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam, at one fell swoop?” So Macduff, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, howled with agony upon hearing his household, wife and babies all, had been slaughtered.

Today marks the 15th anniversary of the mass murder of 14 young women at the University of Montreal’s Ã0/00cole Polytechnique. December 6 is now called the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. It is an honourable title, but I see these words in The Globe and Mail being printed in red blood, not black ink.

Marc Lépine wounded 27 people, but killed 14 of them solely because they were women trying to succeed in this world.

I had taken that day off work to buy Christmas presents for two stepdaughters so young that I was still signing the gift cards “Love from Santa” in a jagged, slanting handwriting, my version of the male cursive and as different from my own as I could make it. I was fooling no one, of course, but still making the Santa effort.

Fifteen years later, I am awaiting the arrival of one of those girls from university in Montreal. The presents then were stuffed toys; now, they are Shakespeare lexicology texts. Sorry, that’s too personal — Attention, treacle cleanup in Paragraph 4 — but this is how people feel about their children, dead or alive.

Pictures flicker in my mind. There was the mass funeral in Montreal, with the white coffins I so dislike because they look more like cake boxes, too fragile to protect our beauties. There was a scream from a family member in the cathedral. I can still remember the sound. Since then, there have been suicides among the other students present and among the families of the dead.

The murders inspired the battle for gun control, which was won six years later. As I trawl the files of news and commentary, I see columnists ridiculing women and the official day of mourning for female victims of violence. On Monday, the flag on the Peace Tower in Ottawa will fly at half-mast. There are small events across the country, and a minute of silence has been planned, but it’s blazingly low-key, perhaps to appease right-wing men who despise the gun control inspired by the killings.

The weeping Macduff is told to take the news like a man. “But I must also feel it as a man,” he whispers. I am entirely without religion, but his next words still speak for me: “Did heaven look on, and would not take their part?”

When grumpy old men and neoconservative old-grumps-in-the-making ridicule the very commemoration of the killer’s hunt for “feminists” (his word), I do wonder. What would move these men? Would pictures of garbled viscera and huge blood-spray patterns make them realize that guns put lavish, bunched-up murder on a fast track? Would fathering daughters do the trick?

Probably not. Ideology, the notion that beliefs are a package deal, blinds us to so much.

Questioning your own ideology is like trying to open your modern hermetically sealed CD cover, a.k.a. the crime of cellophane. Your nails are too short to slide beneath the sealed seams and you can’t find the legendary gold strip alleged to open the thing in one draw. Only a very determined person, armed with perhaps a nail file, can finally open it and say, timidly, “I like to keep my beliefs pristine, but I might well agree with the suggestion that little good can come of a domestic arsenal of which the police are not aware.”

I was calling myself a feminist long before Marc Lépine (tortured by his father when he was a child) mowed his chosen ones down. But still, very few women dare use the “f word” now, even though it no longer has a threatening meaning, like wanting the vote or to be persons under the law. We feminists are hardly fighting for world domination — that belongs to a certain American guy — only fair treatment and dominion over our own bodies.

Not so much to ask, but we still don’t have pay equity, equality at work, freedom from violence and a place to run when violence hits home.

These are the young women who died on Dec. 6, 1989: Geneviève Bergeron. Hélène Colgan. Nathalie Croteau. Barbara Daigneault. Anne-Marie Edward. Maud Haviernick. Barbara Klucznik Widajewicz. Maryse Laganière. Maryse Leclair. Anne-Marie Lemay. Sonia Pelletier. Michèle Richard. Annie St-Arneault. Annie Turcotte.

The narrative of what happened just after five p.m. on that day is full of bravery, confusion and regret. Heidi Rathjen, a student who was there and who went on to fight with Wendy Cukier to establish the Coalition for Gun Control, has written about that evening.

In her book, From the Montreal Massacre to Gun Control, she recalls hiding with other students after someone burst into the lounge shouting, “A guy with a gun’s out there.” She remembers people turning out lights and crouching silently, hearing a girl calling for help and one female student walking outside despite everyone telling her not to. She raced back, saying, “He’s at the end of the corridor.”

And the shots went on, until they didn’t any more.

Women who think themselves equal and free but who won’t call themselves “feminists” might want to Google “marc lépine” and understand how much women — all women — are loathed. We still aren’t safe in Canada and prospering as we should. It is not particularly relevant how that failure is labelled or whether Marc Lépine would be rejoicing today.

Good men and women will keep fighting for the rights of women and one day, some kind of justice will be achieved. That I do believe.