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Dodging the dogma

Feminism, good writing and Marc Lepine helped define the journalism career of former La Vie en rose editor Francine Pelletier

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

There are feminists, and then there are feminists. Even more so during the mid-’80s, when the movement was being consumed by the more radical, humourless, Andrea-Dworkin-acolyte wing. It wasn’t a view shared by all women who considered themselves feminists, and inter-movement squabbles were getting ugly.

On Feb. 27, 1986, the Mirror ran a cover story on the controversy at La Vie en rose (LVR), a feminist magazine edited by Francine Pelletier. The journalist, Paula Sypnowich, looked at the competing forces that were slowly tearing the magazine apart: the pursuit of commercial success, the ethos behind the magazine, the inclusion of male writers and preferring snappy stories over dogma. The magazine, started in 1979 by four young women, eventually fell apart under the weight of the contradictions in 1987, but it launched Francine Pelletier’s journalism career.

“We started, like most success stories, as a fly on the wall,” says Pelletier, now an independent documentary filmmaker, following stints at La Presse, the CBC and Radio-Canada. “It was just a few women getting together and deciding to start their own magazine.”

From its origin as a 24-page insert in Le Temps fou, a lefty magazine, LVR eventually grew into a professional monthly, with circulation hitting the 40,000 mark—the kind of growth that suited Pelletier just fine. “We didn’t want it to be this kind of zero-copy militant’s sheet Xeroxed in someone’s basement,” she says. “We wanted it to be attractive physically and provocative intellectually.”

Radicals aren’t fun

The vision of the paper, however, soon became a source of controversy. While Pelletier says she was always a “small-l liberal,” who tried to inject humour, some sexiness and a lighten-up sensibility to the magazine, the radical wing of the Quebec feminist movement protested.

“The radical lesbians were really trying to jam things down our throats,” says Pelletier. “Not that there weren’t lesbians among us, but we did rub a lot of people the wrong way. We had them peering over our shoulder, wanting us to be tougher, to be more radical.”

But Pelletier wanted to put out a good magazine, rather than a monthly tirade. The decision to go down a business-savvy route was one that didn’t go down that well among some of the more radical québécoises.

“For us, the quality of writing was always paramount,” Pelletier says. “We wanted it to be a writing project as well as a social project or an activist project. We were there because we believed in it being a thought-provoking, well-written magazine.”

The 1986 Mirror article mentioned the controversy surrounding the magazine’s November, 1985 special issue on men, where male writers offered their take on feminism. Pelletier was quoted in the Mirror saying, “People missed the point completely.” She hasn’t changed her mind since.

“It was only controversial for people who think that some things should never change or evolve,” she says. “It was typical: The more we progressed, the more we had a split in our audience. The old-school feminists thought the magazine was theirs, but we wanted to reach out to the wider public who may have been feminist-minded but who may not have considered themselves feminist.”

The Montreal Massacre’s shadow

For all the battles she fought with the militant radical feminists, Pelletier continued to explore women and women’s issues. So when, on December 6, 1989, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women, Pelletier did not dismiss it as the lone act of a madman, or of an Algerian, or of a Muslim, as many in the media did at the time. Pelletier, then a columnist at La Presse, pointed out that he grew up in a francophone, québécois home. “There was a tendency to pretend that he didn’t belong that was very profound,” she says.

“Like most people, like everyone I’m sure, I saw nothing forecast—this just came out of the blue,” she says. “We thought there was no real price to pay for feminism.”

Pelletier had a personal stake in the attack. When police leaked Lepine’s hit list of women he wanted to kill, her name was on it.

Pelletier, now 50, still works on women’s issues, but not exclusively. “I’m interested in a lot of things,” she says. “Some concern women, some don’t.”

Incidentally, a 25th anniversary edition of La vie en rose was published this week.