How do we situate the narratives of women and children in the collective identity, memory and cultures in the Philippines? Probing this question, this panel aims to situate such narratives in the documentation of women's and children's experiences in the Philippines. Decentering the focus from a male-centric view, the panel engages with interdisciplinary approaches from history, gender studies, media studies and film studies in reassessing the integral position of women and children in the Philippine society. In the different experiences of childhood, motherhood, and womanhood, this panel posits that the continuities and divergence in the marginal lives of women and children reflect the dilemma of situation such engendered social actors as they navigate the tensions of exclusion and inclusion in the cultivation of the social and national imaginary. With studies ranging from colonial childhood and motherhood to wartime womanhood, the panel offers insights into the constant necessity of writing the histories of women and children in building the collective memory. Documenting their lived experiences serves as a potent remedy to the exclusionary tendencies of writing the histories of nation-states
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Hidden Labor: Child Indenture and Enslavement in the Early American Period Philippines 1898-1912
Olivia Anne M. Habana
Department of History
School of Social Sciences
Ateneo de Manila University
When the Philippines became a colony of the United States in 1898, child labor was one of the realities faced by the new colonial government. Like many earlier societies, child labor contributed to household income. It was also tied to the Philippines; complex social and economic realities, such as debt dependency and economic necessity in the pre-colonial era and debt peonage in the Spanish colonial era.
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Informed by child-saving ideas in the United States, the American insular government sought to outlaw child labor, maintaining that the only place for children was in school. American officials likened this to slavery, which they imagined much as it had been in the United States: actual possession and ownership of the person. Ironically, while officially pursuing this position, many Americans used child labor and justified it on charitable and sometimes racial grounds. Using official documents and reports, as well as personal journals and correspondence of American officials, this paper investigates and sheds light on child labor and indenture in the early American colonial period in the Philippines, (1898-1912). In particular, it looks at ideas of child labor and indenture from institutions that both supported and decried it. It also looks at actual cases of child labor and indenture in the period under study to see how these occurred in the country. More importantly, this paper attempts to document the hidden experiences and preserve the voices of children who labored, often under appalling conditions, in the early American period Philippines.
Care for the Colonial Maternal Body: Towards a History of the Biomedical Construction of Women’s Bodies in Early Twentieth Century Philippines
Alvin D. Cabalquinto
Department of History
School of Social Sciences
Ateneo de Manila University
This study explores the history of the biomedical construction of women’s bodies through the medical and socio-cultural responses to maternal health in the early twentieth-century Philippines. It interrogates how colonial society defined the maternal body within the dynamics of colonial scientific biomedicine and gendered power relations. This paper first contextualizes the change in education and public health during the American colonial period. It then investigates the colonial maternal body as a distinct biomedical category through content analysis of medical and scientific articles and textbooks on obstetrics. This essay examines the genealogy of a gendered health education tied to the development of colonial medicine, public health, and welfare systems in the early twentieth-century Philippines. Examining the biomedical construction of maternal bodies of Filipino women shows the tensions in attempts to modernize colonial medicine and attempts to understand the bodies of Filipino mothers in a changing colonial society. These tensions reveal not only these views but the actions of Filipino physicians, particularly American-trained Filipino obstetricians, as they reinforced racial and classist tendencies in criticizing indigenous knowledge, denigrating local midwives, and burdening Filipino mothers to be “healthy” and “intelligent.”
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Spiritist Filipina: Tatlong Maria (1944) and the Discourse on the Portrayal of Women in Philippine Cinema during the Japanese Occupation Period
Abel A. Ubaldo
Department of History
School of Social Sciences
Ateneo de Manila University
Tatlong Maria [Three Marias] (1944) is supposed to be the culmination of Japan’s project of de-Americanizing Philippine cinema during the Second World War. As a film about women, advertisements of Tatlong Maria in newspapers and magazines highlighted the role of Filipino women in the liberation of the Philippines from the influence of American colonialism and the rediscovery of the nation’s Asian roots. This essay analyzes the discourses in these marketing materials to illustrate the bargaining and accommodations that emerged from trying to establish the ‘spirit’ Filipino women had to embrace in constructing an independent Philippine state under Japan’s sphere of influence. The goal is to determine the expected role of women within this nation-state, identify who determines such roles, and point out the inherent contradictions arising from defining the ‘Oriental’ essence of a Filipino woman.
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The Filipina in Japan-occupied Philippines (1942-1945)
Ma. Rita Lourdes A. Alfaro
Department of History
School of Social Sciences
Ateneo de Manila University
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This paper portrays how Filipinas figured in the Pacific War by a perusal of personal accounts of the war and uncovering the varied experiences these women endured while the Philippines was subjected to the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945. The Filipina was a warrior, victim, nationalist, and martyr.
As warriors, the exploits of a woman reporter who joined the guerilla movement and under whose command it flourished, are depicted in this research. On the other side of the spectrum, the stories of Filipinas who joined the ranks of the Propaganda Corps in its campaign in exhorting Filipino cooperation with the occupying forces are found. Then there were victims, a young wife, and mother whose rosy life was suddenly thrust into war-torn Manila, and the most victimized was a woman forced into sexual slavery to service the Japanese soldiers and whose young adulthood was marred with the savagery of war and the man in war.
These portraits of women paint how the Pacific War has impacted the lives of the Filipinas, and conversely how their lives impacted the war. War history should not be confined to battles and exertions of its male participants because it necessarily involved women whose participation, on the battlefront or otherwise, formed part of the greater narrative of the Pacific War. Women have long languished behind history, and now is the time to collate herstory and underline, not undermine, her trials and tribulations in the collective memory of the Pacific War.