Feminism

At Large : The personal is political

Rina Jimenez-David
Inquirer News Service

The following are excerpts from a talk I gave yesterday at the National Leadership Training for Student Government Officers held at the Teachers' Camp in Baguio City. I was invited by Businessworks, which is managing the training along with Ateneo Student Trainers (Strains) and the Department of Education, to speak on "My Organization, My Community" during a break-out session for teachers.

Though most of the talk is based on personal reflections and recollections, I must acknowledge drawing from the "Pinay Rosebook," a primer on the history and guiding principles of Pilipina, the national feminist women's organization of which I have been a member since 1981 and currently chair. The "Rosebook" was written mainly by Jurgette Honculada.

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A GUIDING principle in my women's group Pilipina as well as in feminism is that "the personal is political." One cannot be a feminist merely in theory, spouting the politically correct terminology, but living a life of subordination or, worse, oppression. A feminist always has "to bring the issue home." To call oneself feminist is to question the very basis of one's self-identity, to assess and re-assess the most intimate relations of one's life, to dig deep into the roots of one's notions of self and society.

So allow me to begin with the personal. In the beginning, my identity was that of the sixth of nine children, the middle of five daughters, of a middle-class couple with roots in provincial privilege. My mother had trained as a teacher, while my father was a lawyer and a writer.

You could say I had my education in feminism at the hands of the best teacher, my mother. Though she eventually stopped teaching as her family grew, you might say she channeled her ambitions to her children, especially her daughters. Growing up, I never had the sense that I was valued any less than my brothers. Though of course I sensed the usual pressure of social expectations to marry and bear children, equally compelling was the message that we girls had to make something of ourselves. "Never depend on a man for your survival" was a mantra throughout my childhood and adolescence. "Always be sure that you can support yourself and your children."

My mother belonged to the generation and class of women for whom choices in life were constricted, though they embraced their options with equanimity, if not always serenity. But I always sensed that she wanted more for her daughters, and that, despite her motherly vigilance and words of warning, she may have even envied the many other doors opening for us as the Age of Aquarius gave way to the Age of the Power Suit.

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BUT having a richer menu of life choices than our mothers didn't mean life was any less complicated for women of my generation. It may even have made the pressure that much greater. I have been fortunate in that in this long and still ongoing search for meaning and self-hood, I have been accompanied by a man who has no issues about boundaries or control, and has embraced the uneven, helter-skelter nature of our life together.

Someone has said that there can be no more important decision than that of a choice of one's partner for life. But when friends comment how "lucky" I am to be married to my husband, I say luck has nothing to do with it. I don't think I could ever have fallen in love and stayed married to someone else, because I had very clear ideas of what I wanted in life and what sort of man I would need -- whose company I would enjoy -- as we journeyed together.

Indeed, finding the right partner, or working to make sure one's current partner evolves into the right one, is essential if we are to stand conventional family values on their head. I don't know what verdict my children would hand down if asked to assess the impact of having a mother who is a feminist on their own lives. My daughter says she laughs when her own friends wonder how "different" we are, because she considers our family life "normal and boring."

Let me hasten to add, though, that it hasn't been easy, achieving this "normal and boring" state of affairs. Fighting for shared parenthood when my children were much younger was not without its moments of high drama. And I have had bouts with guilt about being a "bad" mother much too often for comfort. Breaking society's rules on gender divides and socialization, the proper toys for a boy and a girl, having my son learn to cook (from his father) or dealing with their growing curiosity about sex, all these call on our creativity and daring, simply because we choose "none of the above" among the available and conventional lessons around us.

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BUT as I said earlier, the "personal is political." And in my case, the political has served the personal well. For if it wasn't for my embrace of the label of "feminist," and for the company of women in Pilipina, I don't think I could have brought home the issue with as much success-or at least a minimum of upheaval.

In 1980, four women -- Irene Santiago, Teresita Quintos-Deles, Remmy Rikken and Sr. Mary John Mananzan -- came together during a bigger gathering of development workers and began talking earnestly, late into the night, about "a question without a name." Their talks led to a series of consultations with women from different sectors, highlighting issues of exclusion and subordination that women felt, even when working with men of a supposedly "progressive" bent (the worst of the machos, it turned out).

The consultations eventually led to the founding of Pilipina in 1981, with the group embracing from the beginning feminism and socialism, because "the struggle for social transformation would have to be waged along gender lines, not just among the lines of class and property relations."