There's The Rub : Legacies
Conrado de Quiros dequiros@info.com.ph
Inquirer News Service
(This is a vastly abbreviated version of the talk I gave last Thursday on the 68th anniversary of the signing of the women's suffrage bill. You may find it has something to say to you, even if you are not a woman.)
I MUST CONFESS I DID NOT EXPECT THE topic you gave me. "If your wife and daughter were part of the fight for suffrage, would you have rallied around their cause? Why?" It sounds almost like a question that is asked of beauty contestants, to which group I am hard put to qualify.
I suppose the people who thought of that question naturally expected me to say yes, and make a case for the nobility of the cause. Quite honestly, however, my first instinct, in the light of the national crisis we've been facing lately, was to say I'd be damn glad if they would just fight for votes being counted, never mind if they came from man or woman. I'd be damn glad if they would just fight to have a Comelec that knew how to count.
But let me assume that having the right to vote means having one's vote counted by people who know how to count, and get back to the question. If my wife and daughter were fighting for suffrage, would I have rallied behind their cause?
Still, quite honestly, I don't know.
I'm not trying to be cute. Where I'm coming from today, that would be the easiest thing to answer. But that is the problem. I know where I'm coming from today. I don't know where I'd be coming from before Sept. 25, 1937, when the fight for women's suffrage would have been raging.
Today, the idea that women are not qualified to vote seems the most ludicrous thing in the world. I can imagine that 70 years from now, the thought of this country's privileged few keeping the wealth to themselves and depriving the teeming many of the bare necessities would seem like the most suicidal thing in the world, a French Revolution in the making. But as we can see, many people today find this a perfectly reasonable arrangement.
What can I say? Life is a paradox. The hardest things to grasp are the most commonsensical ones. The hardest things to see are the most obvious ones. The hardest enemy to fight is one's self.
I must tell you a bit about how I got to be where I am today. I did not live in the 1930s as a kid, I did so in the 1950s in Naga City. I grew up in a time and place where the concept of men and women being equal made as much sense as the concept of the parish not being the center of the universe. Boys did not naturally play with girls, or study with them. I don't know that it derived completely from distrust of raging hormones in juvenile bodies. I half-suspect it also derived from a distrust of girls adulterating boys' mental faculties with, well, lapses in judgment.
I recall that it was the kiss of death for husbands to be called "under the saya," literally under a woman's skirt. Ironically, most of them in my neighborhood were, except that they didn't know it. The wives did rule our neighborhood, except that not all of them did so by showing they were the boss of their homes. Many of them did so by making their husbands think they, the husbands, were. Then, as now, the wives understood the secret of effective rule, which was: Honesty is not the best policy, subtlety is.
How I clawed out of the Dark Ages into the second half of the 20th century is a story unto itself. I'll just mention a couple of things that helped me mightily to ascend the ladder of evolution.
The gratuitous part was that I came to Manila in a time of ferment. The city was afire with activism. The word "afire" is especially apt: The activists then spoke of revolution spreading like a prairie fire, and it did so particularly in the campuses. Each generation creates its gap between young and old, between past and present, but at no time did this gap yawn like a chasm or prove a collision of worlds than then. It broke conventional ways of thinking and doing things probably more thoroughly than the War itself did.
I don't know where I'd be right now if I had not gone through that historic watershed. It is not inconceivable that I would even now be working in America, worrying about the future only of my family.
Of course, not all, or even most, of those who became activists did so out of idealistic fervor or iconoclastic rebelliousness. Paradoxically many of us probably did so out of a deep-seated desire for acceptance, or to "be in," as we called it then. Being an activist, especially after the First Quarter Storm, was cool, as today's kids call it now. You might not always have gotten the girl-or the boy-in the final reel, but at least you got back at a finger-wagging patriarchal society by thrusting your middle finger at it. It isn't really that surprising from hindsight that activism fired the imagination of the scholars in my school, notwithstanding that they stood to lose the most, their parents counting on them to rescue them from poverty. Activism was the Revenge of the Nerds-or the Promdi. Suddenly, "elitista" was out, "masa" was in. Suddenly, to be the son of a tenant was to be lucky and that of a landlord to be cursed. Before this time was over, I would be psychologically as far away from my childhood as Nelson Mandela is ideologically from George W. Bush.
Would I be in a so different place today if that hadn't happened to me?
Well, I'd like to think probably not that different because of one other thing that helped me climb up the ladder of evolution. That is the faculty of self-examination, or the capacity for introspection. It's a truism, but it's true. I've had a lifetime of experience to vouch for it: The easiest thing to change is the world, the hardest thing to change is oneself. Maybe, that's why the world doesn't seem to change at all, or does so ever so slowly.