by Maita Gomez

Maita Gomez is the Manila-area chairperson for GABRIELA, an alliance of local and national women's organizations in the Philippines formed in 1984. The formation of GABRIELA signalled the emergence of a feminist movement in the Philippines after years of development of poor people's organizations. GABRIELA takes its name from a 19th century Filipina leader of the resistance to Spanish colonialism.

In March 1986. GABRIELA held its Third National Congress and Women's International Solidarity Affair, just three weeks after former President Ferdinand Marcos was forced from office and replaced by Corazon Aquino. The following address in reprinted from the proceedings of the congress.

Sisterhood binds us: across the seas, through different languages and cultures, this bond is real because we are women with a common history of oppression, and a common struggle to achieve liberation.

The women's movement, through time, all over the world, has been through many peaks and troughs. It has suffered interrupted existence and development, co-optation, denigration, marginalization and disunity. Nevertheless, it survives, continues to grow and increasingly fulfills for us a worldview that corresponds to the actual realities of our experience as women; realities that we have always been denied by the predominant male bias that defines social questions and solutions.

We are one with you in this respect and different in another. The phenomena of imperialism and colonialism cut through our common experiences as women. Our experience of foreign domination continues to define, deny, complicate and exacerbate our struggle to survive and our right to liberation. The struggle to end imperialist control of Philippine life is paramount to Filipino women. It is a struggle that our loved ones, in centuries past and present have paid for in blood, one at whose altar we continue to make human sacrifice, a struggle that persists even when it seems beyond endurance, a struggle that we will uphold until we are free.

No facet of Philippine life has ever been unencompassed by this struggle to be self-determining as a people. And our women's movement, its history and current evolution is no exception. From the Spanish colonial period, the time of our heroine Gabriela Silang, women's organizations in the Philippines have been off-shoots or developments of national and political movements that enhanced or augmented different standpoints to the questions of Philippine independence and sovereignty.

I do not belittle the courage and ability of these women who both in support of their men and because they believed in the cause, performed not just auxiliary tasks but shared the burdens of revolutionary activity as true comrades. I only want to point out that women were not the initiators and generally not the leaders of these movements.

There are three important points that I would like to make in connection with this observation: 

First, that these movements were begun and dominated by men. 

Being generally confined to the home (especially during the 3(K) years of Spanish colonialism), women's access to information and discussion and thus their social awareness and influences were severely limited. It was to the men that society assigned the right and responsibility of confronting social and political questions.

In these circumstances, oftentimes, a woman's access to involvement in the political arena would depend on the men in her family. In 1986, the Katipunan was established by A. Bonifacio to lead the Philippine revolution against Spain. Here we witness his wife, Gregoria de Jesus, organizing a women's section of the Katipunan. as typical of other heroines whose fathers, husbands and brothers were involved'in the Philippine revolution.

Second, that women's involvement in these movements gave them liberties and roles that were traditionally denied them.

Philippine history bears witness to many women leaders who capably and willingly accepted these non-traditional roles. But in these struggle we do not yet see a women's consciousness distinct from that of men's perceptions to social problems. Although these women inevitably developed the movements they led with their own ideas, a view to social questions particularized from a women's point of view is more or less absent. It is also significant to note that the leadership of these women was most legitimized when it carried the stamp of authority derived from their men. Thus Gabriela Silang led the rebellion she inherited from her slain husband and today. Cory Aquino proclaims. "Let us continue Ninoy Aquino's fight!"

Third, that the goals and objectives of these movements were valid for a' greater or smaller section of Filipino women that represented different standpoints to the question of Philippine independence. History proves that women together with men of their class and nation have common interests that they will struggle to promote even at great risk. Needless to say, 300 years of struggle that culminated in the Philippine revolution against Spain and later the Philippine-American War was the answer to an immediate and urgent demand of the Filipino people, including the Filipino women.

A lesser dimension of this third point is demonstrated by the women's movements during the American colonial period, when women's organizations were established as part of the American "pacification" campaign against the Philippine revolutionaries and later to seek suffrage and reforms within the framework of American domination. The women's movements and organizations in this period were party to the legitimation of a new and more sophisticated form of colonial domination. This was the era of selling American '"democracy"" to the Filipino people, the elite democracy where the Filipino ruling class would consolidate its recent access to political and economic power in collaboration with the new colonial master. This elite recognized in themselves the inheritors and future partners of American colonial power in the Philippines. It was the women of this elite who led the various women's suffrage and reform that were part of a trend to seek liberalization and political rights from the colonial master, a trend which by design failed to call attention to the illegitimacy of the colonial presence in Philippine life. It was a subtle brand of political mendicancy and collaboration promoted by the Filipino ruling class which had already made a break with the Philippine revolution.

Since that period and progressively, as U.S.-style democracy and a semi-colonial status were legitimized, women's organizations have taken the pattern of clearly auxiliary organizations to enhance the status quo: posing as moral guardians of society, promoting inutile reforms, glorifying charity work, drumming up support for the causes of the ruling elite, even for the dictatorship that has just fallen, and reinforcing the role of women as wife, homemaker and auxiliary to men. These women's organizations with their moralistic, elitist and condescending programs, even when they attempt to take up women's issues cannot address themselves to the progressive and democratic demands of Filipino women. Today, the majority of women's organizations outside of the nationalist and cause-oriented movements still maintain this profile.

In the early 70s the re-emergence of another revolutionary women's organization, the Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan (MAKIBAKA). occurred during the period of nationalist and student activism that we now call the First Quarter Storm.

True to the pattern discussed earlier, MAKIBAKA also developed from a predominantly male-led activist movement: its origins can be traced to the militant youth organization, the Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK). As part of the national democratic movement, the women of MAKIBAKA sought not only to mobilize women for a national democratic struggle, but also to develop a women's consciousness. A distinct women's movement integral to the national liberation struggle. MAKIBAKA was the first movement in Philippine history to raise the issue of women's liberation. The emergence of MAKIBAKA signifies the most advanced revolutionary tradition of Filipino women.

With the imposition of martial law. activist and nationalist organizations were declared illegal and forced \o go underground. Temporarily, the open mass movement was effectively stifled. The women of MAKIBAKA answered the call for revolutionary underground work, for urban and rural basic masses organizing, for armed struggle. The pressures of martial law caused the disbanding of the still young and struggling MAKIBAKA. But the tradition that this women's organization has left behind remains — that of addressing the national issues from the particular point of view of women and, conversely, that of addressing a women's exploitation and oppression in its entirety: as Filipino, as member of a class and as woman.

Let us talk of our own women's movement, the women's organizations of today, many of which are only three to five years old. They too have grown out of the national struggle, out of the struggle of different sectors and classes of Filipinos. Many of these organizations also began with little or no understanding of women's issues. Like our forerunners in the Katipunan, we simply saw the need for women to be involved. We were also drawn by the goals and objectives that represent the most urgent demands of the Filipino people: human rights, economic and civil rights, social justice, democratic structures and policies and an end to foreign domination. Women responded as part of the Filipino people, and became actively involved in the anti-fascist, anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle.

In this process, with the tradition of MAKIBAKA to start from, with the voices oi women clamoring to be heard not just as Filipinos but as Filipino women, with the advances of the women's movements in other countries to learn from, our women's movement has begun to see the Philippine problem as expressed particularly in the oppression of Filipino women; it has begun to see the exploitation and oppression of Filipino women in its entirety.

Women's organizations of the basic masses (the workers, peasants and urban poor) form the backbone of our women's movement. These organizations are vital to any women's movement's claims to legitimacy in terms of representing the demands and aspirations of the most oppressed women in Philippine society, of the majority of Filipino women. Women's alliances such as GABRIELA promote the solidarity and support of various issue-oriented, class or sector based women's organizations. GABRIELA also functions as a center for coordinating and expanding women's campaigns. As it grows, it should and is developing into an educational, informational, propaganda and mobilization center, acting as a political center for the women's mass movement. It is a powerful vehicle for unifying women in perspective and action.

Having developed from nationalist and democratic movements, our women's movement today has some decided advantages. Years of painstaking organizing among different classes in society, have given us the advantage to build a multi-class or multi-sectoral women's mass movement. This movement organized along sectoral lines is more effectively in a position to give full play to the initiatives and contributions of women in different classes to the national, sectoral as well as women's mass movements.

Over a decade of political activism under the harshest conditions of repression and dictatorship has provided our women's organizations with organizational skill and political acumen to lead and further develop the women's movement. We should be proud of this strength acquired through dedication and commitment even as we recognize a weakness, or rather a lopsidedness. in our development as activists. While our involvement in the nationalist, struggle has given us the decided advantage to swiftly build a women's movement such as we have today, this same experience has only lately been infused with an orientation that recognize the distinctness of women's oppression.

The MAKIBAKA tradition of situating the distinctness of a women's movement as an integral part of the national democratic struggle has only begun the task for us.

The interrupted existence of MAKIBAKA and the youth of our own women's movement leaves us with a relative backwardness in the thorough learning or internalization of women's viewpoint, a backwardness that is, relative to our internalization of the nationalist struggle and our development as nationalist activists.

Aware of this disadvantage, our women's movement has to address itself to more intensive social investigation into the conditions of women in Philippine society and conduct research on the nature of specific women's problems as reflected in the lives of Filipino women. The more thorough study and firm grasp of the nature, manifestations and roots of women's oppression in Philippine society are among the most urgent agenda for our women's mass movement.

Our women's mass organizations, widespread as they are. situated in the diversity of class conditions in Philippine society, are actually in the midst of the richest material for understanding women's lives and problems. The practical struggle itself will yield much material for discussion and discovery as women share and compare views with each other. A thorough grasp of the women's question necessarily includes a scientific understanding of its relationship to class and national questions. Such a grasp means that we will address ourselves to the totality of women's experience and oppression as Filipino citizen, member of a class, and woman-distinct but interrelated threads of our oppression interwoven into the fabric of Philippine society.

Our development as a women's movement should also evolve forms of organizing and mobilization better suited to develop women's fullest participation in the struggle of the Filipino people in general and the Filipino women in particular. The organization of cooperative day-care centers, the creation of women's desks in mixed organizations are already steps in this direction-. Our social investigation must also give birth to new sections of women organizing: women domestic workers, wives, non-factory wage earners, part-time workers, self-employed/ unemployed women.

The women's viewpoint of our national situation must be comprehensively developed. This means that a women's consciousness about the basic problems of Philippine society and how they affect and interrelate with gender oppression must progress to concrete demands and calls to action.

Today, just begun again to breathe the air of liberty. After 20 years, we are experiencing, with the joy of the hungry, a taste of democracy and liberality. But we must continue to be on our guard because a strong bloc associated with the dictatorship, though at the moment forced to toe the liberal line, still persists in power.

The basic question for centuries of Philippine history — that of independence and self-determination — remains unsolved.

We are not yet free, neither are we truly and securely democratic. It is only a little respite and the cause of all our suffering and deprivation continues to threaten whatever we have gained so far. Conditions today are only more favorable to continue the struggle for Philippine liberation.

For more information, contact GABRIELA, PCI Bank Building. Room 221. Greenhills Commercial Center, San Juan, Metro Manila. Philippines