‘Filipina Females are . . . Running This Country Today’ : In New Philippines, Best Man for Job Is Often Woman

Beneath a banner emblazoned with the words, “Lady, You Deserve a Break,” more than a dozen women costumed as bunnies made their way through the crowded cabaret of the Manila Playboy Club on Tuesday night, serving drinks to the 1,000 or so guests.

There were no catcalls and there was no leering. No one was pinched. It was hardly the occasion.

The occasion was a tribute to the liberation of Philippine women under President Corazon Aquino, the first woman president of the Philippines.

The Playboy Club has been a symbol of male chauvinism the world over. But for this evening it was the appropriate venue. This was the start of a half-price membership drive to entice single, professional women to join the Playboy Club.

The idea for the tribute, which included the presentation of awards to some of the most talented and successful women in the Philippines today--a modern jazz composer, a television anchorwoman and a corporate executive--came from the club’s marketing manager, a woman.

Women ‘Running Country’

Singing star Celeste Legaspi lectured the audience between numbers: “It’s about time the Filipino males realize that it’s really the Filipina females who are behind them, in front of them, and everywhere all around them, running this country today.”

In many ways, she was right.

In the six months since Corazon Aquino replaced the deposed Ferdinand E. Marcos as president, the former housewife has appointed women to key posts throughout the government and helped elevate the status of women in general to unprecedented heights--this in a nation long considered to be the epitome of machismo.

Four of the most outspoken, articulate and influential members of the presidential commission drafting a new national constitution are women. Women occupy three of Aquino’s most important Cabinet posts, as well as half a dozen powerful deputy minister posts.

So pervasive is the presence of women in the new government that Hilarion Henares, a prominent male columnist, recently observed, “The Philippine nation is now under the skirt.”

Marcos had only one woman in his Cabinet, his wife, Imelda, who said in an interview before they fled to exile in Hawaii in February that Corazon Aquino was the “complete opposite of what 1629517679Power here is always the man.”

Private Sector Affected

Aquino’s presidency has had a profound effect on the private sector, too. More and more, women are assuming chief executive roles in corporations, top editorial positions on the biggest newspapers and magazines, directorships of hospitals and foundations.

“For centuries, the women of the Philippines had internalized their role of being the second sex,” Felicitas Aquino, an outspoken feminist and key member of the constitutional commission, said the other day in an interview. “But now we’re seeing a major shift. There is a qualitative change. Women are taking leadership roles throughout society. There is even talk of forming an all-women political party.”

Commissioner Aquino, who is not related to the president, is directly responsible for some of the most dramatic and potentially long-term gains for women in the Philippines since President Aquino took power. As head of the commission’s social justice committee, she was responsible for including in the final draft of the constitution the following paragraph:

“The state shall protect working women by providing safe and healthful working conditions, taking into account their maternal functions, and such facilities and opportunities that will enhance their welfare and well-being to realize their full potential in the service of the nation.”

The reference to “working women” was essential, Commissioner Aquino said, because as much as women have gained in the middle and upper classes and in Manila’s halls of power, they continue to be “severely oppressed among the lower classes and working classes.”

Women’s Pay Lower

According to a number of recent studies, both private and official, women working in factories earn at least 20% less than men in comparable jobs. And according to women’s rights groups, in rural areas, where more than three-quarters of the population lives, women are often not paid at all for the same work that men do.

The laws that Commissioner Aquino and her 48 colleagues are attempting to change with the new constitution discriminate against women in terms of property rights, acquisition of assets and in conjugal law, she said. Divorce is illegal, as is abortion, and only women can be charged with adultery. Men who violate their marriage vows can be prosecuted only under a “concubinage” statute, which provides for much milder penalties and requires an enormous amount of proof for conviction.

Other advocates of women’s rights note that it is women who are suffering the most under the current economic crisis. The number of prostitutes has risen sharply, pregnant women, some as many as eight months into pregnancy, are forced to continue working to prevent their families from starving, and women have been left alone with their children by husbands who have taken jobs abroad.

Nonetheless, Commissioner Aquino said, she is confident that her group, which was handpicked by President Aquino, will give women equal status--at least in the law--in their final draft of the constitution.

“The collective drift” of the commission, she said, “is toward liberalism.”

Liberated in Past

Philippine women have not always been subordinate to their men. Lupita Aquino Kashiwahara, a sister-in-law of the president and an analyst of Philippine society, said in a speech she delivers here and abroad that “Filipinas were among the first liberated women in the world,” even before the Philippine Islands were colonized by the Spanish in the 16th Century.

The ancient society that descended from the migrant Malay tribes in the Philippines was matriarchal: Women controlled the family, they retained their maiden names after marriage, they had an equal say in choosing marriage partners, acquiring property and entering into business contracts.

When Spain conquered the islands, though, the colonists “introduced Catholicism and male dominance that reduced women to subservience,” Kashiwahara says. Under the Spanish Civil Code, which was in effect here for 350 years, “Women enjoyed no greater rights in family and property than minors, lunatics and idiots,” she says.

In 1898, the Americans replaced the Spanish as colonial masters and introduced a milder social code that began to give women back their rights. Women again took control of the household, but in many cases it continued to be largely a behind-the-scenes role. The Philippines had a female Supreme Court justice long before the United States did, and it elected its first female senator as early as the 1950s.

“We have a woman president after only 40 years of independence,” Kashiwahara says. “The United States of America is 210 years old.”

Law Still Discriminates

Yet Philippine law still discriminates against women.

“With so many centuries of conflicting colonialism, it is no wonder that today the woman’s role in the Philippines is a paradox,” Kashiwahara says.

She notes that Corazon Aquino, while campaigning in January for the presidency, pledged: “I will be the mother of my children, and the commander-in-chief of the Philippine Armed Forces.”

For some women prominent in Philippine society, President Aquino is less a catalyst for women’s liberation than the product of it. Melinda de Jesus, editor of the magazine Veritas and a longtime anti-Marcos activist, said: “It is not that Filipina women are more liberated because Cory Aquino is president. Cory Aquino is president because Filipina women are more liberated.”

Noting that Aquino’s strong showing in the Feb. 7 election resulted in large part from the mobilization of the nation’s women as campaign workers, De Jesus said, “I would say President Aquino is the poetic extension of the independent reality that women of this country have come out of their kitchens and their homes.”

Aquino’s Contribution

De Jesus and other influential analysts and critics of the nation’s developing new society say they worry that the cause of women could be set back for decades, perhaps centuries, if Aquino’s presidency fails. But others say the country’s first female president has already left a positive and lasting mark on the nation.

Columnist Henares observed in a recent column that the nation can overcome its devastating $26-billion foreign debt and its internal political crises only by standing firm against foreign debtors and local political warlords.

“We feel safe with women running the nation,” he wrote, “because what we need right now are leaders who can say no . . . and women are used to saying no, even if they mean yes or maybe.”