Subject: Streetwise - A woman's liberation
Streetwise*
By Carol Pagaduan-Araullo
A womans liberation
Last March 8, GABRIELA, the foremost Filipino womens alliance
championing womens rights, held a nation-wide mobilization to
commemorate 100 years of International Women's Day (IWD).
Let us recall that it was Clara Zetkin, an outstanding German socialist
and a fighter for women's rights, who proposed in 1910 that an
international working women's day be held on March 8 of each year. March
8 marked the day when hundreds of women workers in the United States of
America demonstrated for the right to suffrage and to build a powerful
garments union.
The following year in March 1911, more than one million women and men in
Europe attended IWD rallies campaigning for women's rights to work, vote,
to hold public office, equal pay for equal work, maternity and child
benefits and better working conditions as well as for the general
upliftment, emancipation and empowerment of women.
GABRIELA emphasized that this year, IWD will be commemorated as,
worldwide, women join their menfolk in mass protests and uprisings
spurred by the burgeoning impact of protracted global depression
especially in poor and backward countries in the Middle East, Africa,
Latin America and Asia.
Further, the alliance said, Filipino women, like our toiling sisters
in other countries, suffer from the same torment of poverty, hunger and
violence caused by imperialism's last ditch attempt to salvage its
moribund existence by plundering poor nations and further enslaving the
working class people.
GABRIELA concluded that Filipino women must demand immediate respite from
the Aquino government through urgent socio-economic reforms as well as
join the rest of the Filipino people in struggling for fundamental
change, for genuine freedom and democracy, against an elite-ruled and
foreign-dominated social order.
At the March 8 rally, as I waited to deliver my speech to the thousands
of women gathered at some distance from the Presidential Palace, I could
not help but reflect on my own sojourn as a woman, from a carefree middle
class upbringing to one defined by the social and political struggles and
upheavals of my generation.
I thought about how I had been surrounded by feisty, assertive and
articulate women all my life: a mother who transcended social
stereotypes, was an outstanding operating room nurse and a working woman
all her life; aunts who despite economic hardships guided their brood to
stable and successful careers; sisters who are capable and personable
individuals, accomplished in their own fields; friends and most of all
comrades who have struggled to combine the roles of working/career women,
activist/revolutionary and wife/mother/daughter - to varying degrees of
success.
My father gave us a very liberal upbringing. He made sure his children
had all the opportunities to excel in school and have an active social
life. There was never any stereotyping of girls as good cooks,
homemakers, fashionistas. But he did expect his daughters to serve him
his coffee while the only boy was free to gallivant.
My education in an all-girls school run by socially-oriented nuns, who
were exacting in academic work and disciplinarians to boot, gave me the
basic skills, self-confidence, and empathy for the poor and
underprivileged that served me well in my adult life. It also provided
the inestimable benefit of growing up in an academic environment where
being a male was no advantage. There werent any.
In high school, I was introduced to the concept of womens liberation
by my eldest sister who left for the US to do graduate studies and
eventually settled there. She had strained against the social
conventions of her time that kept even middle class, educated women from
being equal to men and achieving their full potential as individuals.
She became a feminist and an active participant in the US womens
liberation movement.
When I entered the University of the Philippines, the liberal arts
program of the general education course (which UP has since abolished)
reinforced my openness to feminist views from the West, my involvement in
moderate social activism at the UP Student Catholic Action, and later, in
more radical student activism as a member of the student council and
while doing organizing work among jeepney drivers and the urban poor.
My stint at UPSCA was a major venue for male-female socialization. A
milestone in my life took place in the friendly environs of Delaney Hall
and the UP Chapel: that is where I met my first boyfriend who eventually
ended up as my lifelong partner.
My husband deserves several sentences in this narrative. Being much
older than me, he was mature where I was immature. Being an engineering
graduate, he was practical-minded where I was an idealistic AB Psychology
student. Being a patriot, a democrat, and a closet Leftist, he was
supportive of my political activism.
And being the self-confident, loving man that he was, he let me pursue my
passions and my commitments with nary a hint of jealousy nor insecurity
even as he worried and watched out for me at every turn. (Yes, of course,
we wrangled about the inherent dangers and the time away from family that
was the offshoot of my political activities.)
As I grew more deeply involved in the national democratic movement, my
ideas about egalitarianism, social progress and commitment to a cause
higher than oneself resonated with the movements Marxist philosophy,
revolutionary political analysis and program and its mantra Serve the
People.
This includes the presumption that being a woman is no barrier to being a
dedicated activist and revolutionary. It also meant subordinating
boyfriend-girlfriend relationships to political considerations.
It meant making independent decisions that entailed risks and sacrifices
including the risk of being separated from one's boyfriend or husband.
This was a harsh reality especially during martial law when the tempo and
direction of one's life were altered in major, unanticipated ways.
The struggle for women's emancipation from feudal culture as well as
bourgeois stereotypes had to be carried through inside the nd
movement. Notions of sexual roles were rapidly being transformed even as
there was also resistance to change and the vestiges of old-type
relationships persisted.
More important, the need to organize women who, as Chairman Mao said,
hold up half the sky, to achieve their own liberation from
economic, political and cultural bondage was met by the conscious effort
to build a distinct womens movement integrated into the peoples
movement for national and social liberation.
I will always credit and be grateful to the two major influences towards
my liberation as a woman the national democratic movement and the
people women and men alike - who fostered my full development as an
activist/revolutionary and as an emancipated wife and mother. #
*Published in Business World
11- 12 March 2011
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