I AM ANGRY BECAUSE YOU ARE UNJUST:

A FILIPINO WOMAN'S AWAKENING TO FEMINISM

Dalumat Ejournal

Vol. 1, No. 2
2010

Jeane C. Peracullo

De La Salle University

Abstract

Anger has to be the most misunderstood of all human emotions. Filipino women in particular were
brought up to believe that they should hold anger in check, and that a virtuous woman is one that
projects nice-ness, pleasant disposition and meek attitude. Over the years, Filipinos have come to
regard this portrayal as a myth and several attempts were done to change this image towards a more
holistic one, which shows Filipinas as strong women, equally capable of the expectations and tasks
usually assigned to men. Yet, like any myth, the myth above has never gone awayit is there buried
and hidden in the collective Filipino psyche and once in a while it is summoned to put a woman in her
place, and to remind her where she should be in the scheme of things. Anger, a Filipino womans anger
in particular, tells us that she refuses anymore to be compared to a myth.
This paper is two-fold attempt to articulate a Filipino womans awakening to feminism. First, it tells a
story of an ordinary housewife culled from the various narratives shared by Filipino women in Parola,
Tondo. Secondly, it is an account to explain the double-bind women experience in our culture.
Key terms: Filipino women, feminism, myths about women, anger, sexual awakening
Introduction

Feminism unmasks maleness as a form of power that is both omnipotent and nonexistent, an unreal

thing with very real consequences (Mackinnon 1982 in Humm 1992, 119). What emerged from feminist
discourse is a new method of consciousness-raisingthe collective critical reconstitution of the meaning
of womens social experience, as women live through it.
On August 16, 1996, my group of graduate students from MaryHill School of Theology went to
Parola Tondo as a requirement for our class in Socio-Cultural Analysis. We were greeted upon arrival by
suspicious stares of residents who told us during a consultation meeting that they were wary of people
who come to them with just two things in mind: to campaign as political candidates or to take pictures
of them so they can get International Aid for themselves. We looked around us and we almost wept. It
was the height of Philippines 2000 campaign of then President Fidel Ramos. The goal was to rally the
country towards first-world status. Clearly somebody was lying because what we saw were squalor and
unreeling poverty. We asked the community leaders why they still persist in living there despite the total
lack of social services, they answered, "Saan kami titira?" (Where will we live?) "Buti pa ang basura

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hinahanapan ng lugar kami hindi."(Garbage is luckier. The government wants to look for a suitable place
for it).
During our stay we experienced anger. A very deep anger that could only be described as
righteous because it sprang from a very intense desire to change the situation of the people we
encountered in Tondo. We were awed by community leaders who were all women as they bared their
hearts and thoughts to us. We did nothing but to listen and wept.
The story below reconstructs a story of a married woman in Tondo based on my conversations
with actual women. Although our visit was unfortunately brief, these women told us their thoughts and
feeling on their roles as housewives, mothers and community leaders. These women were highly
politicized and were acutely aware of their unjust situation as poor and as women.
A Woman of Tondo
I was 13 when I first came to Manila. Life in the province was hard so young girls like me were forced to
look for a job in the big city. Somebody told my parents that Manila was a glittering place where all your
dreams come true. My older sister and I were sent here as soon as the word for a possible employment
arrived.
My first job was a maid for one of those rich families who lived in very grand subdivisions. My
day consisted of cleaning the entire house with its 7 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, a living room, a dining
room, a kitchen, and a den. I dusted and mopped, polished stairs, straightened beds and flushed the
toilets. I was assigned these jobs because I was told I was young and therefore could do them. When I
got older and my body filled-out, the master of the house started to hit on me. I told an older maid about
this and she in turn informed our mistress who promptly kicked me out of the house.
With nowhere to live, I stayed with a co-maid's relative in Tondo. It was here that I first saw my
husband. He courted me and I eventually married him even though he had no job back then. This did not
bother me; all that mattered was that he was a young handsome man and we loved each other. I got
married when I was 17.
It was when I married that my difficulties as a woman began.
My husband worked as a stevedore in of the forwarding firms around the pier. He was earning
just enough to make both ends meet. Our economic situation worsened when we had our first child.
After a year, I gave birth to another one. And then I became weighed down by sufferings.
A woman is tied to her child. You cannot just leave him alone. He knows your smell and is
practically attached to you and clings to you everywhere. Yes, life can be hard on women.
When I was growing up, my family expected me to clean the house, to cook, do laundry, and
countless other things while my brothers were free to roam around. I once asked my mother why I was
doing all of these while brothers were not, she replied that I could do them better because I was a girl.
Now that I am married naturally it is my job to take care of my husband and children because I
am a woman.
After sometime, my husband was laid-off from work. I can still remember how I would stare
blankly at the wall frantically wracking my mind where to get money to buy something to feed my
family. I was so sick with worry. With 3 children and a husband to provide for, I combed the

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2010

neighborhood trying to borrow money from friends who were also poor like us. Eventually, somebody
loaned me some capital to buy and sell fruits which I peddled around.
Perhaps it is of little consolation that my husband does not beat me. He likes to drink though and
the habit worsened when he had no job. I used to nag him to do this and that but instead of doing
something he'd sulked and not helped out at all. Now I just let him figure things out on his own.
He has a job now driving a pedicab from our home to Divisoria. He works late at night because
merchants usually drop their goods to be sold during this time. He works until 6 in the morning then he
comes home and gives me money for food and the kids' allowance for school. Sometimes he has no
earnings so we starve for a bit and the kids do not attend their classes.
The women's organization here has helped us women to cope with our difficulties. We gather
once a week and we talk about our lives. Sometimes discussions revolve around dealing with our unique
situation as poor women. For example, this woman is beaten by her husband with alarming regularity
but she insists she loves him and will not leave him. This woman bears a philandering husband for the
sake of her children. And this woman shares how she is seriously considering prostitution so she can feed
her children. There are times when discussions turn political and we talk about the problems of the
country. These weekly gatherings have opened my eyes to the reality of being poor and a woman in the
Philippines. I have come to realize that a poor woman's situation is doubly hard: for being poor and for
being a woman.
One day a fire hit our place. We knew it was done by some government operatives to force us
out. They wanted to build railways but we stubbornly held on and refused to leave. The fire started when
the entire Parola was asleep. We were not prepared for the disaster so we stood there helplessly looking
at our shanties as the fire quickly and mercilessly devoured them. My children were quite small then so
we did our best to build a makeshift shelter for them with plastic bags and sticks. It rained and it shone
and we were living inside that shelter.
I sometimes cry when things become unbearable but there are moments when even crying can't
bring relief. During times like these our weekly female gatherings become indispensable. They provide
help to cope with the crises in my life.
I cannot forget the first time I joined a political rally. I was so scared I just froze when the police
attempted to block our group from moving closer to the US embassy. The other women of Tondo were
not all fazed. They shouted at the policemen and when the latter moved closer with their crowddispensing weapons bared and raised, these women kicked them in the shin, and some even pulled some
poor policemen's hair. During that frozen moment my entire wretched life flashed before me and I felt
rage stirring to life. Suddenly I was not scared at all. I joined my companions. I have been attending
rallies ever since.
There are people from various groups who come to us and ask us things. I have become
suspicious of their intentions. Sometimes they come over to tell us that we are suffering, that we are
poor, and that we should not allow ourselves to be in this situation. But what do they really know? Have
they an idea of the extent of our sufferings and tribulations? These people are often landed and welleducated and well-fed. So I ask them about the concrete things they intend to do now that they've seen
us and talked with us. How are they going to articulate our voices to those who have rendered us

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voiceless and faceless? How are they going to bring our cries and longings to those who consider us nonpersons? It is so easy to delude ourselves that these meetings can be helpful to us.
Our culture really bears down on women. We taught our women that they should be obedient
and chaste and remain virgins till they marry. But we have women here who are driven to prostitution so
they, and their families, survive without dying from hunger. I tell these women to go ahead but make
sure that they look for clients who pay the highest price. Doing this for the sake of one's children is a
noble thing. This is a way to preserve one's integrity even as a prostitute. We think that women in our
country are very powerful because they are the queens in their homes, but of course their husbands are
kings. Or power resides on one who holds the purse strings in the family. This is a delusion because I
experience how it is to go crazy when my husband gives me a pittance and expects me to stretch it till
next payday. Sometimes, only God knows when the next one will come.
The Awakening to Feminist Consciousness
Pioneering Filipino feminist Delia Aguilar describes the conflicts and struggles of Filipino women,
especially housewives, as paradox of domesticity (1988, 380). Culturally, they are viewed as primary
caregivers of the family. It is a role to which they have been simultaneously revered and enslaved and
like all other forms of oppression this one has been imbedded into their collective consciousness.
Filipinas define themselves by this care-giving role. They are praised for their extraordinary ability to
manage the household despite the meager salaries their husbands and/or children give them like in the
case of the women in Tondo.
Hunger, poverty, and desperation are not unique to women. Certainly, men are also
victimized by structures of oppression but women feel the brunt greater because they are brought up to
imbibe a certain consciousness that they are primarily caretakers. And this social and political role is
rooted in the understanding that because biology has so ordained that women have wombs, it is but
natural that they become the nurturers. This is where the paradox comes in. Filipinos are familyoriented but the dynamics of the family is both painful and sweet and it strikes most deeply into Filipino
womens understanding of themselves.
I was especially struck by the stony and hard expression on that one mother who was pregnant
with her 9th child. All throughout our visit, she did not smile at all. I wonder what was going on in her
mind. What was she thinking? I suspected that she had retreated somewhere far, far away in her being
where the constant and insistent hungry cries and pleas of her children did not reach her.
Simone de Beauvoir, a French philosopher, and in so many ways the mother of feminism, offers
a prescription to right the wrong that is sexism. In her pivotal work The Second Sex she writes, One day
I wanted to explain myself to myselfand it struck me with a sort of surprise that the first thing I had to
say was I am a woman. This statement captures what to her, womens experience of emancipation. As
a slave in Albert Camus The Rebel sensed that what his master asked of him violated his fundamental
dignity as a person, there occurred in him a feeling that was basal, crucial and gut-wrenching, it enable
him to say no, which led him to fight for the end of slavery itself! Womens struggle for emancipation
rests on this awareness of unfreedom too, and the allusion to slavery is not at all circumstantialit is as
complex and as painful. While slaves declare their humanity with cries of I am free! women mark this
crucial encounter of liberation with an affirmation, I am a woman.

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I am a woman as an affirmation of liberation is a product of a relentless quest for identity brought

about by a singular question, What is a woman? This question, for Beauvoir, becomes a pivotal
point by which all statements, definitions, theories, and narratives about women are examined and
judged. She begins her search for a definition from biology, so as to create a blueprint, a roadmap
even, of what a woman is. The data from biology yields the conclusion that woman is womb and
this description becomes the source of womens unfreedom and oppression. That she is interpreted
merely as body because of this biological fact makes her oppressive situation inescapable,
therefore, her lot and her destiny. To prove this thesis, Beauvoir looks into the historicity of this
image of woman as body in literature written by both women and men, pores over history and
philosophy written mainly by men, and examines world religions founded by men. From these she
concludes:
Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is
not to be regarded as an autonomous being. Man can think of himself without a
woman. She cannot think of herself without a man. And she is simply what man
decrees thus she is called the sex, by which she appears essentially to the male as a
sexual being. For him she is sex---absolute sex no less. She is defined and differentiated
with reference to men and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental as
opposed to the essential. He is the subject; he is the absolute. She is the other (1989,
passim).
Woman then is second sex insofar as she is assigned second place to man. This is evident
especially in patriarchy where this standing is not imposed of necessity by natural feminine
characteristics rather by strong tradition under the purposeful control of men. These traditions are
deeply ingrained in the psyche of a woman, manifested in her dreams, idols, and fears. Eve becomes
the archetype that represents the purpose and destiny of a woman, which is to rescue man from
loneliness. All daughters of Eve are created and designed to allay this existential fear. Myths abound on
women who are defined by their relation to men and if they manage to escape this definition, they are
viewed as beings to be feared, despised, and subdued violently. Is it any wonder therefore, if every girl
dreams of a prince to rescue her from a miserable existence (which, from these stories, is often brought
about by other women)?
Using the analysis of de Beauvoir, there is dialectical tension in Filipino womens awakening to
feminist consciousness. There is liberation in the awareness that a woman can take control of her life.
She is not passive. She takes charge. But this liberation is somewhat superficial as it still bounds her to
socially constructed oppressive roles because she has a womb. A knee-jerk response to this dilemma is
to reject that which so defines a womanthe womb. Yet such prescription may not be entirely
embraced by these women in Tondo. It is not surprising that feminism is not a popular term here in the
country. It has been associated with men-bashing, which some women find utterly ridiculous but
themselves will wont to agree that men in our country enjoy more privileges than women.
The Woman in Pain: From Absent To Present, Forgotten to Remembered
Very early on, Filipino women have taken upon themselves to be the testament to the validity of the
statement, it is a woman's destiny to suffer. Isn't it true that a woman's body is so designed to bear

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the pain, hurt and misery of menarche, menstruation, pregnancy? Of what is the use of the womb if not
to bear children? Arent the breasts to provide lactation? The image of the Madonna and Child looms
heavily; it provides a fitting image for a loving mother. The Pieta provides a magnificent background for
a long-suffering mother. Indeed, to suffer and to suffer in silence are the two qualities of a good Filipino
woman. Yet our women in Tondo refused to be defined by this solely when their regular meetings
allowed them to uncover patriarchal dynamics in their homes in particular and in society in general.
Following MacKinnon, the awakening to feminist consciousness brings forth the realization that
male power is real; it is just not what it claims to be, namely, the only reality. In consciousness-raising,
women learnthey have learnedthat men are everything, women their negation, but that the sexes
are equal. These propositions are contradictorythe contents are revealed true and false at the same
time. In consciousness-raising, women uncovered their subjugation. Women are mens equals,
everywhere in chains. The realization then is that women are not at all mens negation, nor mens
negativity.
This realization follows several steps:
1. Invitation. How a woman is comfortable with her pain is a process of awakening. Every awakening
process is marked first by invitation"I would like to experience my body more." This invitation
becomes the call of the self that is integrated and whole. It is also marked by searching. A woman
search for this "to be" with a friend or with a loving community that allows her to be herself. And when
she is lovingly supported, she begins to discover and disclose her deepest fears and sense of loneliness.
2. Remembering. She begins her second act of liberation by remembering. To remember is not a mental
acther body remembers the forgotten, the rejected past experiencesnot to deny them but to
integrate them or come to terms with them so they would be appreciated fully. In remembering, she us
led to another awakening. She realizes that her body-image, consequently her self-image, is socialized
and constructed by the father-figures in her life. Yet this is not an easy realization as she descends into
the dark because she is breaking her self-images so she can own her name.
Remembering is what David Michael Levin (1985, 53) terms as recollection or erinnerung. This
process requires that she goes very deeply into her experienced body of perception; that she goes very
deeply into her bodily felt sense of the visionary experience; that she goes very deeply, and with trust,
into the unsatisfactory feelings and attunement characteristic of this experience; that she encounters
the truth of this dissatisfaction in an open, inquiring manner; that she contacts her need, and the great
depth of her need, in that unfamiliar 'inwardness'; and that she responds appropriately to the 'felt'
sense of what claims her attention. This erinnerung also requires a second phase, in the sense that she
will feel a need to retrieve, from the very depth of her pain, her affliction, her ontological
dissatisfactions, an experience of Being in its more hospitable, more wholesome dimensionality.
Levin continues that recollection is much more than a process of contacting and retrieving. It is
also a process of developing our bodily awareness and cultivating its capacities. In the case of the body
in pain, Levin argues that the therapeutic response must consist in going down still more deeply into the
bodily feels sense of our visionary being, so that we make contact with its more open dimension. This
more 'open' dimensionality of our visionary being is always already ours so that in recollection, we are
progressively realizing what we were given to understand all along (1985, 53 )
One of the difficulties of recollecting is the possibility that one has become numb by too much
pain. Numbness is not pain or about being in too much pain. To be numb is to deny pain, which is
contrary to the nature of pain (insistent, clawing, can even draw one to madness). Numbness is a
strategy to deal with pain, when feelings are turned inward. What the process of recollection suggests is
that one does not deny pain; one ought to take note of the pain. So the movement is from numbness to
pain; from denial to acceptance. What the feminists are saying is that too often women deal with

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deeply buried anger, dissatisfaction with the world by turning against their own bodies by regarding
them as the source of their general unhappiness.
In pain, the body remembers. To remember and to appreciate, she has now the "inner"
resources to meet the demands of crisis and change. She enters into the second moment when she goes
into the process of discovery. She befriends her desires and fears; she befriends her brokenness so that
they become sources of joy. Not to deny but to respond to the call of brokenness is the positive
outcome of this discovery. In the breaking, there is truth-telling. She begins to tell the truth about
herself. She has come to terms with her own desires, with her feelings. "I feel therefore I am." She
begins to utter a conviction, "I am accepted, I am beautiful."
3. Homecoming. In the breaking, there is homecomingcoming home to her womanhood. In the
context of liberation, to be liberated is to be conscious of the real selfthe truth of being a person, of
being a self, has set her free. To be liberated is to have to know an identity of self-hood. .
CONCLUSION: THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL
This classic feminist adage still resonates every time we hear or read or gather womens individual
stories. It is through these individual stories that we get a glimpse of the real feelings of women, which
are, for a very, very long time, not considered as valid as reason to help us think critically. How many
times have we heard that women ought to avoid being mad or hysterical because they become very
emotional and thus, become irrational? Most Filipino women are aware of this yet as we gathered from
the women in Tondo, only through their expression of anger that they were able to recognize that their
being women somehow contributed to their experience of poverty. For instance, poor women generally
do no have access to personal income because they have too many children to take care of. Or that as
women from poor families, they were denied access to higher education because such privilege is often
given to male offspring.
So, womens expression of anger, pain, and sorrow is very instructive because such strong
feeling arises out of a realistic assessment of a particular situation. Strong feelings help us to be in touch
with reality in its utmost starkness and ugliness. Outrage in particular has the ability to affect change.
Our countrys history bears testament to the many ways our people have gathered themselves and cried
in collective outrage against tyranny, dictatorship and plunder of our nations wealth and sense of
dignity. We have cried, Tama na, Sobra na. (Stop it. That is enough already). In this sense, the
capacity to feel strong feelingsto feel very deeply and passionatelymarks a good and compassionate
character, which is able to feel and understand where the other is coming from, and resolves to do
something to right the unjust situation. Anger, such a misunderstood term, is changed to Sacred Anger,
a transformative force informed by reading and listening to stories of poor women.

REFERENCES

Aguilar, Delia. 1988. The feminist challenge. initial working principles toward reconceptualizing the
feminist movement in the Philippines. Malate, Manila: Asian Social Institute.
De Beauvoir, Simone. 1989. The second sex. Translated and edited by H.M. Parshley.New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc.
Humm, Maggie, ed. 1992. Modern feminisms: political, literary, cultural. New York: Columbia UP.
Levin, David Michael. 1985. The bodys recollection of being. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Mackinnon, Catharine 1983. "Feminism, marxism, method and the state: an agenda for theory." Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 515(1983).

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