Review and appraisal: The situation in the early eighties
In 1985, the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW) described the condition of, and issues faced by, women in rural Philippines as follows (NCRFW 1985):
1. Philippine agriculture was generally male-oriented, but it nonetheless absorbed 55 percent of all rural female workers. Women, however, comprised only 30 percent of all agricultural workers.
2. Adoption of new technologies has effected a shift from unpaid to paid labour. This was shown by the increased weeding requirements of the high-yielding, early-maturing rice varieties. However, mechanization of such operations as threshing has reduced the share of landless women in the rice harvest.
3. With the exception of home management and other "feminine" inputs, agricultural programs rarely considered women as target clients. This was true for the government-sponsored cooperative program, extension, or credit. This bias against women was attributed to the general assumption that the men were the full-time farmers, while the women were "merely housekeepers".
4. Among the technicians of the Department of Agriculture, only the Home Management Technicians worked with women, although women technicians comprised 58 percent of all technicians (Unnevehr and Stanford 1985:15).
5. Women seemed to prefer combining their economic role with supervising or attending to their home responsibilities. This partly explained the survival of subcontracting schemes which, although generally susceptible to exploitative practices, thrived in rural areas because they do not take women away from their homes.
A more critical reading of the decade was offered by an alternative report on rural women (Pineda-Ofreneo 1985). While the report alluded to the issues raised in the official report, it also traced the roots of rural women's oppression to the imperialist forces that controlled Philippine society; their membership in the more disadvantaged class consisting of peasants, agricultural workers, and other marginalized sectors; and their gender, which placed them at a greater disadvantaged position than the male members of their class. These underlay such specific issues confronting rural women as invisibility of much of their work in labour force surveys, resulting in low labour force participation estimates for women; low wages which, in the case of seasonal plantation workers, were allegedly below the legislated minimum wage; growing landlessness among the rural masses as land got concentrated in the hands of corporations and the rural elite; disastrously low demand for major export crops, including sugar, in the world market; labour-displacing and environment-unfriendly technologies; conversion of riceland to subdivisions; and intensive exploitation attending rural piecework. Moreover, rural women suffered from double or multiple work burdens as well as from illiteracy and lack of training. All these, Pineda-Ofreneo argues, were reinforced by prevailing notions that the home was still the rightful place for women and that the "economic and cultural subjugation of Filipinas in the countryside generally prevents them from having a concrete awareness of their own reality" (1985:22).
Of greater import to changing rural women's condition lies not in economic and welfare projects for women, but in organizing and educating the women. The 18,000-strong Katipunan ng Bagong Pilipina (Alliance of New Filipinas), or KaBaPa, distinguished themselves on this score as they combined involvement in community projects and services with study meetings, and literacy and other mass campaigns with political content.
To redress the inequalities besetting rural women, the 1981 Conference on Equality, National Independence, and Peace passed a resolution on rural women, which included the following: broadening of consciousness raising so that rural women could understand the goals of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; promotion of literacy and training programs; sharing of household work with men, which would free women to participate in affairs outside the home; urging women to involve themselves in organizations, cooperatives, community work, economic and political activities to broaden their perspectives and cultivate their potentials; implementation of land reform; creation of remunerative employment opportunities for poor women in rural areas, of increasing regularity, and of equal pay; and effective measures, laws, and controls to protect women workers in homebased industries from exploitation.
Part of the thrusts and objectives raised in the Conference were echoed in the official report's forward-looking strategies, as follows (NCRFW 1985:72):
1. Involving women in agricultural technology and management training, which could help overcome traditional barriers thus enabling them to view themselves as equal partners of men and not merely as their auxiliaries in agriculture.
2. A closer monitoring of subcontractors to eliminate oppressive terms of employment, as well as a reexamination of industrial policies toward the establishment/dispersal of industries to rural areas to provide the women alternatives to subcontracting arrangements.
3. Increasing women's access to effort/time saving technology to help them in the discharge of their double responsibilities and to afford them time for leisure activities.
In addition, the NCRFW report sought the recognition of the value of house-work, stipulating that "the working conditions of domestic helpers . . . should be improved by legislation, assigning higher wages, social benefits, tenure and perhaps professionalization" (1985:72). This proposed action promised relief to young women who migrate from the countryside to the cities and end up as domestic helpers.
