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Sunday, March 12, 2006
Sun.Star Essay: Woman talk
By Erma M. Cuizon
SOME years ago in Bohol, we interviewed two wives and mothers about their thoughts on women’s rights during a women’s conference. One confessed that after she excused herself from her husband to attend the conference, he said, “Sus, wimen, wimen na sad mo!”
Three house girls in our household had heartrending bio-data –--they were young mothers abandoned by their husbands. After a year or two, we came across similar stories in the next batches of house help. Mostly, the women and girls from the neighboring provinces “lost” their husbands. So they came to the city to work as house help, even if they stay up nights missing the infants they left behind.
The woman is someone expected to find fulfillment in the husband (if he comes around again) and the children, who’s told by the community how she must live.
In the towns, the happy homemaker cleans the house, the yard, washes clothes, dishes, cooks forever. In urban places, the freer woman still cooks, goes to the malls, takes the kids to school and gets them back. Since there’s a house help to do the washing and cleaning of the house, she can go attend PTA meetings or do the housewife hobbies.
She’s happy, she’s not.
This reflects what an American leader of women’s movement, Betty Friedan, said in describing the unfree woman in “The Feminine Mystique” published in 1963. She refers to the woman’s uneasiness in her life as perfect wife and mother, “a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning….”
“As she (the woman) made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip cover materials, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question, ‘Is this all?’ ”
It was “the problem that had no name," said Friedan.
No doubt about it, the fight for the rights of women continues and there are enduring women’s groups who handle the problems of women realistically, staying clear of politics, even while there are political women’s groups fuming as a matter of image.
The semblance of the termagant woman was explained once by a feminist who said the women had to “make noise,” sometimes sounding unreasonable in their marches to call attention, otherwise who would have listened to women in the early 1900s? The Feminist movement was a sounding board, a roaring drum; feminists were blatant, almost angry.
But the groups that didn’t let go of the real causes for women, more useful than plain marches, continued to move, more quietly, with more work done, the voice partly heard in government, business, education, the professions, to do women justice.
Central in the American women’s movement, author Betty Friedan (whose “fight” took over 60 years of her life) said it wasn’t a male-versus-female thing.
In her book, Friedan made the women think twice, made them find the reason why theirs was a cause to fight for because there was a need to, even up to now.
But the question is: should a woman “have it all”?
Should a woman stay home, take care of the household and work at the same time, “having it all”?
This is another woman talk, of course.
But there’s something else to this at this point. In 1982, Friedan wrote another book, “Second Stage.” In the book, she says there’s a new aspect of the women’s movement. What women have won, after all these marches, may be “far from reality--– and the small degree of power women now enjoy, hunger for…as never before.”
“The very choices, options, aspirations, opportunities that we have won for” leads to another level “beyond politics and public life.”
Friedan looks beyond the small steps made today. “The second stage involves coming to new terms with the family-–new terms with love and with work…(which) may not even be a women’s movement” in the face of “human wholeness.”
There will come a real equality for men and women, a new life with choices, with meaning that weighs in the real worth of each.
It can’t merely end up with a victor and a victim, otherwise the battle is simply turned over with the victim turning victor, and then back again….
This, of course, is woman talk.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (March 12, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here.
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