My dad’s two hands were held up in front of me. “Cory Aquino and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo” my dad said, holding up two fingers on his right. “The Philippines’ two female Presidents”. His left hand represented the United States— no fingers.
He told me his right hand once mirrored his left, and for a while too. When I asked my dad his first memories of gender roles, he said he couldn’t remember. They were embedded like concrete into his life, but came into his view in the second grade. Aside from core subjects such as math, reading and science, elementary schools in the Philippines also had “home economics” and “woodworking education” classes. But these classes weren’t electives, they were predetermined — on you guessed it: gender. Girls took “home economics”, where they learned household skills like sewing, cooking and cleaning. Boys took “woodworking education”, where they learned how to work with wood, tools and cars. And I know what you’re thinking— it’s completely biased and sexist. I did too. My dad saw the mixed look of disbelief and then curiosity on my face, but to my dad and everyone else at the time, it was completely natural. It was how he grew up, he told me. “That’s just how things worked”.
And that was how things worked for every elementary school in the Philippines. Listening to our conversation from the other room, my mom came in to add that her school had the same classes, and created that same divide. But my dad continued to tell us of a slightly different experience. One day, he told me, his teacher had the boys and girls switch classes. Girls were finally allowed to leave domesticity, literally (my dad remembered a fake house set up in the back of the school, complete with a kitchen and bedroom), and the boys would take a break from their saws and screwdrivers, trading them for needles and thread. No other school had done this, my dad’s siblings never switched classes, and neither did my mom. Somehow my dad’s teacher was able to switch the classes, and though he never found out why, he knew that it wasn’t an accident. It was here where dad learned to cook beef stew and patch holes in clothes, skills he didn’t mind learning but his classmates mocked as “women’s work”. The other boys thought it was crazy and wrong, because they were doing what the girls did. “It was unexpected— I really enjoyed it, but for some reason it felt wrong that I didn’t because nobody else did”.
Nobody else saw these activities for what they really were: repeatedly pulling a needle and thread to mend clothes, or chopping carrots for a stew. They saw a woman attached to these tasks, then drawing the automatic conclusion that it wasn’t meant for them. Looking back, my dad saw a larger issue— or rather the root of one. At nine or ten years old, he was immediately taught what activities and kinds of jobs were meant for men and women and expectations that he had to follow, without explanation. “It’s how we grew up,”, my dad kept repeating during our conversation, almost apologetic for what he and his classmates grew up believing in.
Fast forward ten years and as a college student in 1986, my dad attended rallies in favor of the “People Power” movement to overthrow the corrupt, dictator Marcos and elected Cory Aquino, the Philippines’ first female president. People took to the streets with signs in Cory’s signature color, yellow, united against their current president. Marcos had been cheating, lying, and stealing from the Filipino people for a full twenty years before this movement, and though it took a while, it gave way to female leadership— in 1986 and after that. Now the United States is waiting for that same breakthrough, “I mean, look, laws currently regarding birth control and women” he said. “They’re made by the males in Congress”. Well, for now.
The way we grow up today is changing; gender issues and sex discrimination have shifted to the forefront of news and social media. I asked my dad what he thought would happen next, and he was hopeful, “Just look at the news”, referring to the #TimesUp movement and the nationwide women’s marches. We now grow up in a world where these roles are being broken and discussed. “We need to see change”, he said. “YOU make sure it happens”.
