A Salute to the Many Strong and Well-poised Women in our Lives
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I’m Filipino and a female one at that. Although my country has seen changes on the women’s liberation front, we still have a long way to go before we can say that our country’s gender parity issues are truly a thing of our patriarchal past.
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Corazon C. Aquino was the first female Filipino who got elected to the presidency. Her ascent to that high power was even more significant because of the fact that she came out from being a fulltime mother and housewife to literally end a dictatorship. Her family background is not ordinary, of course, as she was the wife of the slain senator Benigno Aquino, Sr. However, it was the first time in relatively recent history that a wife in grief had risen to the challenge, come out of the shadows and fought not only for her family but also for all the Filipinos oppressed by a repressive regime headed by the late Ferdinand Marcos.
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I was only in elementary school when Cory Aquino, as we fondly call her, won back for all of us our freedom. I have experienced first-hand the difficulties of living under military rule. Incidentally, our country also had a prolonged period of drought during that time. My folks were mostly farmers, so were our neighbors.
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You can surmise how my early childhood was. It was a time of extreme lack. The farmlands had cracks in them so deep, cobras had taken to them for their abode. We actually had to be extra wary of cobras suddenly springing their hoods up the cracks. We had to search for wells that still had water. We had to go deep in woods and gather in sack loads whatever leaves we could get our hands on for what remained of our livestock. We would eagerly wait for our ration of USAID’s bulgur wheat in school and whatever else our teachers would hand out to us. I remember that at times, we were also given boxes of Colgate toothpaste with the friendly-looking crocodile on its packaging, of course, also made in the US. (This story merits extending, but to make things short, this is the reason why most Filipinos or at least those around my age have a very strong affinity to US-made products.)
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So, the Colgate toothpaste thing stands out in my memory because we actually didn’t really take a liking to using it. Is it special to us or is it true for all children? We didn’t really like brushing our teeth back then even with the crocodile enticing us to do it.
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There’s that and back in the day, we couldn’t even afford to buy our individual toothbrushes. Yeah, we’re that poor. But no worries, my mother had a solution for most things. She would cut guava stems and brush our teeth with them. I guess we just got so used to it, but believe me, not just one dentist took notice of my pearly whites. My mother, whom I call “nanay”, was even present when one dentist marveled at how white my teeth were. In other words, the product was completely dismissed except for the small ripples caused in our heads as to what a crocodile could be. To this day, although the state of the affairs teeth-wise has dramatically changed because of my black coffee habit and fondness for sweets, my mother would always remind me not to forget to take care of my teeth.
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I digressed. Going back, in the years preceding Corazon Aquino’s ascension to power, our country was reeling from a serious drought and economic challenges. We could not till our lands. Some neighbors, in fact, had started selling their land chunk by chunk on account of the drought. They were literally forced to give up farming for other jobs. What I personally saw was the throng of farmers forcing themselves to do jobs in the public works and highways and the national irrigation office. Somehow, there still were those jobs, but they had to do those under extreme climactic conditions.
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When the drought was over, the farmlands were farmlands no more. The farmlands I grew up with became a residential village. It was clear to my young mind that the farmers were unwilling to go back to farming. One farmland after another was sold off, completely changing the landscape. I can cry about this alone, but that will be for another time too.
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Due to the dictatorial government that we had, the many extra-judicial killings carried out, and grave abuses suffered from the government side, this was also the time of heightened insurgency in my country. On one side, we were terrified by the caravan of military troops always heading somewhere. On the other side, we had all these stories of rebels macheteing turncoats and “headaches” in society, and the “headaches”, of course, included young children. Yeah, young children too! It was, by the way, the time when everybody walked to get to anywhere. All throughout our elementary and even our high school years, we walked to and from school and to anywhere else. Since we did see everything, never in our heads did we doubt the veracity of the stories. You can say that we were all jumpy that time.
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And thank God, it ended.
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We just commemorated the day we regained our independence from a tyrant. It’s actually only yesterday. It’s called EDSA People Power Revolution. It’s noteworthy for being a peaceful way of overthrowing a dictator. Against the people’s earnest prayers for change which they took to the streets, the military, although under strict orders to repress the mass action, was left too moved. Instead of carrying out the orders from the tyrant, they defected and joined hands with the peaceful protesters.
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And so thank God for that.
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And that officially started my initiation to the idea that women hold power of that magnitude too.
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Corazon Aquino was well-educated, well-mannered, soft-spoken, and ever so graceful yet she held such power and commanded immense respect from people. In 1986, Time Magazine named her the “Woman of the Year” saying that she “managed to lead a revolt and rule a republic without ever relinquishing her buoyant calm or her gift for making politics and humanity companionable.″ (AP, n.d.)
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That image of her has remained in my memory, and in very trying times, she’s one of those female figures I look up to for inspiration and composure.
Especially composure.
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[1] Published by Author on Medium.com
[2] Engel, Ph.D., R. W. (1979, September). Nutrition and Related Services Provided to the Republic of the Philippines. Https://Pdf.Usaid.Gov/Pdf_docs/Pnaag927.Pdf. Retrieved March 16, 2022, from https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/Pnaag927.pdf
[3] Jarenpanit, T. (2015). The Nonviolent political movements; Case study of People Alliance for Democracy and People Power Revolution. Political Science and Public Administration Journal, 6(1–2), 147–175. Retrieved from https://so05.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/polscicmujournal/article/view/86912
[4] The Associated Press. (1986, December 28). Corazon Aquino Named Time Magazine’s ‘Woman of the Year.’ Retrieved February 11, 2022, from https://apnews.com/article/615a8ab52c097ace6095f72d38819ece
[5] Mapping Militant Organizations. “Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army.” Stanford University. Last modified August 2018. https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/mappingmilitants/profiles/communist-party-philippines-new-peoples-army
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