Women need more than bread to keep body and soul, having at core a creativity that needs to be stoked by more than the conventions of maternity and domesticity.
In nearly four decades of teaching in college, Josephine is happiest when former students update her that they continue to pursue a life of the mind after graduation. Over the years, more women among her former students return to pursue their passions.
Taking up writing again is a decision made by those who have the will and discipline to fit this in while balancing work-from-home and homeschooling arrangements. Writing fiction or creative nonfiction is viewed as more than a pastime by many of Josephine’s former students.
Writing is essential for self-expression, mental health, and wellness. For overseas workers cut off from family, writing helps them face loneliness, fatigue, and anxieties.
New media opens opportunities to post one’s work, give and get support from fellow writers, and join virtual workshops. A solo parent said that talking about writing projects with her Messenger group helps to put her personal struggles in perspective and keeps at bay temptations for self-harm.
While still deep in struggles to create an impact through their participation and productivity in the public spheres outside of the domestic, women demand society’s recognition and support for nurturing their creativity as they are more than the sum of their accomplishments and failures as wives, mothers, solo parents, and workers.
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” wrote Virginia Woolf in “A Room of One’s Own.”
Nearly a century later, Woolf’s extended essay published in September 1929 contains commentary that is relevant for Filipinas.
Despite the continuing impact of the coronavirus pandemic on economies and societies, the Philippines fares comparatively better than other Asian neighbors in promoting the status of women, according to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap Report 2021.”
In this latest report, the Philippines places 17th, “with 78.4 percent of its overall gender gap closed to date,” an achievement that places the country second only, following New Zealand, in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region, wrote Helle Buchhave and Nadia Belhaj Hassine Belghith in their April 11, 2022 report on blogs.worldbank.org.
Buchhave and Belghith also point out that being a “best performer” in gender equality in the EAP region raises the stakes for the Philippines to improve the participation of women in the labor force.
The writers single out four major interventions to improve gender equality: giving better access to education and training to acquire skill sets, particularly useful for work-from-home and e-commerce arrangements; closing the wage gaps between men and women; supporting arrangements for shared care of children and elderly parents; and the inculcation of values in domestic and social institutions that promote and support women’s participation in the labor force.
While focusing on women’s labor participation and productivity, Buchhave and Belghith’s recommendations show ways for public and private stakeholders to boost women to tap their innate potentials and attain their holistic development.
Society’s development rests on empowering women to empower themselves and their sisters. As Woolf wrote almost a century ago in her timeless essay: “there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of (a woman’s) mind.”