At Large : Angels and suffragists
Rina Jimenez-David
Inquirer News Service
A HUNDRED years ago, a group of young women, led by Concepcion Felix and including Trinidad Rizal, sister of the national hero, met and organized the Asociacion Feminista Filipina, dedicated not just to defending and upholding the rights of Filipino women but also to advancing the nationalist cause.
A year later, in 1906, Pura Villanueva, at that time an 18-year-old lass from a prominent family in Iloilo, convened the Asociacion Feminista Ilonga. But while their sisters in Manila chose to concentrate on improving the welfare of women and children widowed and orphaned during the Filipino-American War through Gota de Leche, the first private social welfare institution initiated by women in the country, the Ilonggas embraced a loftier cause: winning the right to vote for Filipino women.
Little did they know that 31 years would pass before they would finally win for women the most basic right of citizenship. But if the suffragists ever lagged in their determination, or flagged in their dedication to the cause, they showed little proof of it. When the Philippine Assembly placed an additional imposition before the suffrage measure could be passed, subjecting the issue to a national plebiscite, the suffragists, Concepcion Felix de Rodriguez and Pura Villanueva Kalaw among them, hitched up their long skirts, pulled their "panuelos" [shawls] tighter around their shoulders and campaigned from town to town, city to city. On April 30, 1937, Plebiscite Day, women trooped to the polling centers and voted overwhelmingly in favor of suffrage.
Finally, on Sept. 15 that year, President Manuel Quezon signed the Woman Suffrage Law, bringing to fruition the dreams that drove the country's first feminists.
* * *
SADLY, a movie or even a TV special has yet to be made documenting and dramatizing this epic struggle to gain for Filipino women the most basic recognition of their rights as citizens.
But if anybody's contemplating such a project, he or she would have a wonderful template in "Iron Jawed Angels," an HBO original movie that will have its Asian premiere on Sept. 6. Starring Hilary Swank and Angelica Huston, "Iron Jawed Angels" tells the story of a group of younger women who, impatient with the slow and conventional political struggle being waged by the mainstream suffragist movement, decided to take a bolder, more confrontational approach.
Swank stars as Alice Paul, the Quaker activist who defies the counsel of older suffragists, such as Carrie Chapman Catt, portrayed by Angelica Huston, who prefer a policy of accommodation through the slow, painstaking means of getting state legislatures to pass suffrage laws.
The younger women, who set up the American Women's Party, are bent on getting President Woodrow Wilson's personal endorsement of the 19th Amendment, citing his own lofty rhetoric about democracy and the people's right to proper representation. Even as America finds itself embroiled in World War I, they persist in their confrontational tactics, including mounting a vigil by the White House gate. When the women are finally arrested for "obstructing traffic," they are hauled off to prison where, launching a hunger strike and refusing all attempts to get them to eat, they earn the sobriquet "Iron Jawed Angels."
* * *
THIS made-for-TV movie succeeds in dramatizing the sacrifices made by American suffragists in winning a right women today take for granted.
The sacrifices include not just enduring imprisonment, forced feedings and maltreatment, but also forsaking romance and marriage, and in the case of a sympathizer married to a senator, even placing a "successful" marriage, as well as her social standing, at risk. But the biggest sacrifice of all is paid by Inez Mulholland (played by Julia Ormond), a beautiful lawyer and brilliant speaker, who agrees to go on a grueling national speaking tour despite her health problems, leading to her death.
More than once, I've heard younger women declare themselves "post-feminists," which I take to mean that they no longer feel the need to confront the "women's question" in their lives and in society. And indeed, thanks to women like Alice Paul and Concepcion Felix and Pura Villanueva and their followers in the women's movement, "post-feminists" can afford to take their rights, dreams, aspirations and autonomy for granted. "Iron Jawed Angels" should remind all of us how difficult has been the struggle, how fragile are our gains, and how easy everything we have won can be taken from us.
* * *
ABOUT the same time that "Iron Jawed Angels" will be airing, another movie, destined for the big screen, will be tackling women's issues from a more intimate, smaller and more personal point of view.
"The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" is adapted from a popular novel for juvenile readers that tells the story of four friends who, before starting summer vacation where they will be separated for the first time, find a pair of vintage jeans that, by some miracle, fits all of them perfectly.
They agree to share the "lucky" pants among themselves, convinced that only good things can happen to anyone wearing the jeans. In that one summer, the four teens live through the perils of first romance, divorce and the re-marriage of a parent, the death of a friend, and the dangers of living in denial.
Suffragists and feminists might scoff at the treatment given to the problems faced by four young women of privileged backgrounds and what may seem like self-imposed emotional crises. Then again, who are we to tell women what is important and not important? If feminism is about giving everyone choices, then it is imperative that we respect those choices as well, even if we feel we would not have made the same ones.