"Men are the head of the household." The middle-aged provincial Philippine woman - a wife, a mother, an English teacher - speaks for all five women at the lunch table. "Women," she continues, with an infectious laugh, "are the neck. What turns the head?"
Another concurs, supplying an example: "I have a friend whose husband is a professional; he works in a firm. The wife started a small poultry [business]. She put on jeans and a shirt, saw to the feed, saw to the shipments of chickens, everything. Little by little, the poultry became quite a successful enterprise. Now that it is so big, the husband always say 'My poultry.' The wife just keeps quiet. But when it comes down to it" - the narrator pantomimes - "she knows who built the poultry up. And everyone else knows, too."
The neck-turning-the-head quip deftly defines the society in which Filipinos operate: at once quintessentially macho and fundamentally matriarchal. This seemingly contradictory yet clearly demarcated tension plays throughout the lives of most Filipinos. However, Filipinos seem not to perceive themselves in an either/or tension, as American women might. Instead, if they talk about it at all, things are both/and: Women are complementary rather than opposite to their menfolk.
Women are at the heart of complex social and economic changes afoot in the Philippines. While there are strong parallels to worldwide changes, they have a distinctly Philippine spin to them. To start, there is the separate noun, Filipina; Filipino is use for Philippine men and, generically, for the people of the country. These two gender-specific nouns reflect the Spanish colonial heritage but have been incorporated into daily speech in both English and the national language, Pilipino. Continued usage of these nouns constantly underlines the distinctions' importance in the culture.
In 1988, according to figures in the Philippine Development Plan for Women, 1989 -1992, 59 percent of Filipinos were rural (down from 62 percent in 1980 and 67.5 percent in 1975). Thus poor peasant women seem to be typical. But increasing rural landlessness and urban industrial development make cities magnets for people who cannot earn adequate livings on the land. Across the country, one finds deeply traditional women, startlingly contemporary women, and the enormous mass in the middle who are neither and both.
'Iron Butterflies'
The Philippine ideal or "the myth" (as essayist Carmen Guerrero Nakpil puts it) is of a pliant, submissive housewife noted for fragile beauty, shyness, virtuousness, and femininity. In public, they frequently, graciously, often demurely, defer to men. What struck her as a child, remembers Karina Constantino-David - a sociologist, community development activist, folksinger and daughter of outspoken nationalist Renato Constantino - was her father and his friends at the house debating momentous national issues, with her mother in the background pouring tea. "But when they were alone together, they talked of the same things as equals.”
Underneath their veneer, as anyone who spends time with them quickly learns, Filipinas possess tensile strength. Everywhere, everyday, Filipinas work hard and run things: families, farms, businesses, community activities municipalities often, cities
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