Woman of the plaza

No Baby Talk
By Georgene Rhena P. Quilaton-Tambiga

                There is this woman I often see at the plaza. Daily San Carlos sun burned her skin. She looks like she has come straight from anybody's muddy floor. Almost every time I pass by the plaza, she sits there protected only by the roof of the Kiwanis Club waiting shed. What breaks my heart is the sight of her children running on the street within her view and she is just there sitting calmly a lighted cigarette on her pursed lips and a thin baby sucking at her sagging breast.

                This woman is the antithesis of the kind of woman I dream myself of becoming. She is probably not the kind of woman most girls today dream of becoming. But as this is March, the Women's Month, I reflect on her image and start asking what made her become the woman that she is now.

                Evelyn Cunningham, an American civil-rights-era journalist, wrote that "Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their oppressors." And just when we think oppression takes only the form of physical abuse we are entirely wrong. I have seen young girls deprived of their dreams of going to school because they are sent to work in someone else's household instead. I have heard the lament of a promising girl who dreamed of going to a university but because her parents thought she couldn't make it because she is a girl she is forced to take a course she is not interested in and consequently lost the opportunity to develop her potentials.

Evelyn Cunningham, 1916-2010, civil rights journalist
"Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives
in intimate association with their oppressors."

                Everyday I meet girls in the neighborhood forced into marriage because their parents wanted to get rid of one mouth to feed. And who can deny the rising number of Westerners (not all of them are Americans) now in the city in search of that one lucky, Filipina whose fortune the dollars, or Euro, will change forever? How many of these "lucky ones" were actually prodded by their own mothers to go and chat with a foreigner in an Internet café?

                Many other forms of oppression that exist in our society only seem like any other person's pain in the neck. Collectively, these pains become the ill that turn us, Filipino women, into hapless, paralyzed victims of the society we all think is warm, loving and sheltering.

                The moment a single opportunity is denied to a woman of any age, economic status, and skin color oppression takes place. The moment a woman is forced to do what she loathes to do, there is psychological abuse. The moment parents, siblings, husbands or partners fail to give a woman the respect she deserves they are starting the vicious cycle of treating us all the lesser degree of humans.

                Since our government continues to tarry on passing into law a proposed bill that will give women, girl-mothers and their children the one shot chance to quality life, many more women will continue to be the oppressors of their own selves and that of their children. Their ignorance of their potentials and the inavailability of the means to harness them through good health and education becomes their primary tool in this unconscious abuse.

                I wonder: In what milieu did the woman in plaza grew up in? Who were her first oppressors before the whole San Carlos community started oppressing her and she, in turn abused her children?