Today’s Philippine media remains oppressive and vindictive about women. It reinforces the traditional image of women as either meticulous or martyred housewives, mothers or domestics, girlfriend, date, mistress and sex object.

Women are portrayed in significantly more home roles than men. The next most dominant role for women outside the home is that of an anonymous employer or of other stereotyped images of women as less important, less intelligent, of less consequence and weaker than men. Filipino women, then, are portrayed as inconsequential, passive, male-dependent, anchored to home and family, concerned mainly about their looks and intent on living a leisurely life. In other words, Filipino women are irrelevant because their collective consciousness of such plight is not yet fully developed.

But the plight of the Filipino women is a paradigm of contradictions in Philippine society. Their lives speak of the struggling of their nation as a whole. Their stories are real and disturbing and with Filipino women naturally gifted with internal courage and strength listening from their sisters, can they afford to turn a deaf ear? Certainly not.
From the roots of babaylanes gifted with both psycho-spiritual healing and political counsel, the women revolutionaries and fighters who faced the full force of Spanish conquerors, and American and Japanese colonizers, to the women professionals and religious who joined to march at EDSA against the dictatorship of Marcos, women’s movement was born and has slowly taken a respectable place in the Philippine society. It has come a long way from the lineage of centuries-old revolutionary struggle to a recent feminist direction on women liberation. And its existence means that Filipino women truly understand gender oppression, that they are after all a relevant race. Hence, Philippine society will definitely be better off if women take the lead in moral recovery.

Some of the women organizations worth mentioning are: the Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan (MAKIBAKA), a radical group led by students during the early seventies which pioneered in the women’s fight for national liberation and the development of a women’s consciousness; the Samahang Progresibo ng mga Kababaihang Pilipino (SPKP) which reportedly reached a membership of 8,000 women and which gradually gave way to the Katipuinan ng Bagong Pilipina (KBP), another group of women which collaborated on certain projects with the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women; and the PILIPINA, a mass-based feminist organization established in 1981 and has founded other organizations with varying concerns such as BUNSO, ANAK, MEDIAWATCH Collective, the Asian Women’s Research and Action Network (AWRAN), the Philippine Women’s Research Collective (PWRC), Women’s Action Network for Development(WAND), Legislative Advocates for Women (LAW), Sama-samang Inisyatiba ng Kababaihan sa Pagbabago ng Batas at Lipunan (SIBOL), the Coalition for Peace and the Lakas ng Sambayanan.

The General Assembly Binding Women for Reforms, Integrity, Equality, Liberty and Action (GABRIELA), too, is another coalition of various multi-sectoral groups which expanded since it was formally established in March 1984. It went nationwide and even got to affiliate with it the Alliance for the International Decade of Women, which had 45 member organizations down South, including Women’s Alliance for True Change (WATCH) and peasant-based community organizations.

Another organization that deserves special mention is the Women’s Desk of the Concerned Artists of the Philippines which is the only organization of its kind. It was able to strongly project itself in public from the very start as a group of feminists composed of artists and media women committed to consciousness-raising through popular media.

Over the years, these women organizations raised the class question in feminism and affirmed the need to restructure society and restructure gender, not just one or the other. It has also caused gender advocacy to move out of Manila into the different regions and provinces, out of schools and universities into the rough and tumble of daily life, hence, the growth of women’s crisis centers, women’s micro-enterprises and community programs to combat domestic violence. But despite all these, certain questions arise and shaken the prospect of real and lasting organization and mobilization of a unified women’s movement in the Philippines: What should be their common goal and commitment? What parameters should be developed and bottom lines set? What unities should bind women organizations and what differences distinguish one from the others? Where does sisterhood end? How should women address the society about equal rights that feminism is not for women only?

A feminist direction has crystallized and is “fast blossoming into a garden of a hundred flowers” because the Filipino women have finally come into a certain degree of consciousness on the massive social patterns of women’s oppression. The long and deafening silence of ethics regarding violence against women is at least coming to an end.

With the women’s movement, women turn their private troubles into public issues by telling their own stories about life. In the process of listening to one another, they are able to discover common themes that bind them more intimately as sisters. And by means of naming their own experiences, and asserting their own worth and dignity as persons, they are able to engage in moral, and not just therapeutic, activity.

Filipino women now begin to question the government, the law and the Church about how women should be regarded. For indeed, women’s movement is deeply ethical in nature because it often relies upon concepts from moral traditions. And since the only material for feminist ethics at this point of time are the concrete experiences and stories about and by women, honesty becomes a primary principle. Only then can feminist ethicists attend to them - analyzing the roots of oppression, rank orderings of value theories and making ethical decisions. But lack of ego or sense of self esteem to remain a major hindrance to women’s autonomy in the ethical field, hence, the necessity for an authentic women empowerment.