We are ending the month of March with several commemorations – Fire Prevention Month, National Women’s Month, International Women’s Day (March 8), and the end of the Lenten Season as we await the coming of the Risen Lord on Easter Sunday on month’s end.
In many ways, these milestones have a semblance with each other. For one, March 8 became annually observed as International Women’s Day in 1910 to honor women workers in the needle and garments trades who marched through New York City’s Lower East Side to protest child labor and sweatshop working conditions, and demand women’s suffrage.
It was also reported that because of the labor strike, some women perished in a fire that struck the garments factory. It is not certain whether other countries commemorate Fire Prevention Month in March like the Philippines, but it is striking to note that women perished in a fire that occurred, thus, making March 8 as a global occasion to honor the achievements of women, recognize their contributions to society, and advocate for gender equality.
Feminist journalist Jurgette Alviola Honculada, the first summa cum laude graduate of the then School of Journalism and Communications (now College of Mass Communication) of Silliman University, contends that a decade after her college graduation, in the 1980s, she fully embraced the cause of gender equality and women’s empowerment.
“It is my experiences in the labor and women’s movements that have taught me my first lessons in citizenship—not through theory, but through practice, or praxis—theory combined with practice. These lessons learned in practice, for me, are precisely those that I offer on citizenship building for journalists,” Honculada expressed.
She said that the chance “to make all things new, of fresh beginnings, is what puts fire in the belly of the NGO activist, the labor organizer, the gender advocate, the crusading journalist.” Honculada, in fact, is all of the above.
According to Honculada, gender is one of the three cutting-edge movements of the last, and this century, the other two being the environment and peace.
You must have heard the phrases “gender blind” or “gender bias.” So, what is gender? Very simply, it is how girls and boys grow up into maganda and malakas, that is to say, how they are taught by home, school, church and media concepts of womanhood and manhood to follow and fit into. The concepts have their use as guides, but once they become stereotypes, they can suffocate and become instruments of inequality and discrimination. For example: ang lalaki ay hindi umiiyak, ang babae ay hindi magaslaw. True, or false, or trulse?
To be able to make sense, as a journalist, of the raging debates on the reproductive health bill, one needs to understand the basic issues that undergird the debates such as women’s autonomy and bodily integrity. Meaning to say, since women bear the baby for nine months and take care of the baby for the next 9 or 19 years, she must have the first and last say on whether and when to have a baby.
“Isn’t it strange that men—including and especially bishops, priests, politicians, husbands—are the most vociferous in the debate over women’s sexuality and fertility?” lamented Honculada.
The gender lens enables us to understand and highlight, and take full account of, another dimension of reality, the gender dimension. So what difference does a gender lens make? All the difference in the world—because it allows us to count women and to make women count. Counting women means not only fully valuing their labor, which the GNP does not, but also valuing their experiences and highlighting their difficulties.
Take politics, which is mostly a male narrative with men playing the lead roles. But, a full account of politics in the country must also tell of the women barangay health workers (BHW) and barangay nutrition scholars (BNS) who have become barangay kagawads and council members—not as proxies for husbands and fathers, but on their own merit.
And, as we rejoice in the Risen Lord after some time of waiting, we are enjoined to cherish freedom and embrace the truth—tell the untold stories, speak of both the trees and the forest, bask in the grace of God, and find the answers to all the nagging questions in our head – perhaps, not now, but in God’s own perfect time.
A blessed, meaningful Easter to all our readers! | NWI
