The Philippine Women's Movement Claiming Autonomy |
“ This also resulted in the emergence of new approaches and styles in education for empowerment and in the projection of women’s issues such as domestic violence, trafficking and the commodification of women, violence against migrant women and rape to the forefront of militant organizing and campaigns.”
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“The Philippine women’s movement has successfully defined its place alongside the nationalist democratic movement that toppled the dictatorship of former president Ferdinand Marcos. It has established its activist space alongside all the other movements that continue to work for the betterment of the country. But the call for an autonomous women’s movement persists and one feminist who struggled for the women’s place/space is raising questions.
In the pitched battles against the dictatorship of former president Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippine women’s movement fought side by side with the rest of the nationalist democratic revolutionary movement. This revolutionary movement is still working to establish genuine national democracy in the Philippines but some, if not many, of the older Philippine feminists have decided to establish and guard their autonomy from it. The nationalist democratic revolutionary movement was and, to a large degree, is still guided by a strategic program of political action and by a distinct and massive political organization that involved both legal and underground personalities. These functioned as a closely coordinated movement around the theory and practice of “democratic centralism.”
The movement’s primary players are activists of the First Quarter Storm, a period in the history of Philippine student activism characterized by mass mobilizations and camp-ins, a period that is a watershed in the entire history of the struggle to depose Marcos. Years later, many of the women activists from that period had either completely left direct political work but remained “allies” or active supporters of the nationalist democratic political force, or had been deployed for some semi-legal or legal support work for the nationalist democratic revolutionary movement. These women, whom I refer to as the autonomous nationalist democratic feminists, were invigorated by feminist ideals and ideas that came outside of the ideological scope of the nationalist democratic framework.
The conjuncture that led to the autonomy of the women’s movement involved three major developments that began in the first half of the 1980s and intensified up to its second half. The first development was the intense involvement of the nationalist-democratic revolutionary movement in legal activities within a wider, broader and politically more colorful anti-dictatorship struggle. By the second half of the 1980s, the political terrain had changed to one where legal and open party politics and social activism through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) had become a possible option for the revolutionary movement. ”
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