Filipino Woman Writing

Publisher Fact Sheet The first anthology to bring together the work of Filipina women authors, this collection explores Filipina identity as a meeting place of Asian & American cultures.

"The first of its kind in Philippine scholarship. It chronicles the evolution of Philippine literature simultaneously in terms of medium (English) and gender (women). In addition, the book proposes hypotheses regarding the whys and wherefores of this specific segment of Philippine literature."--Page [4] of cover.

The author describes the essays in this collection as "mongrols of a sort"--part personal essay and part literary commentary or criticism. The conversations range over the narratives of several generations of women writers, from Maria Paz Mendoza and Edith Tiempo to F. H. Batacan and Tara Sering; and cover conventional realist novels and short stories, as well as fairy tales, chick lit, crime fiction, and war memoirs.

This ground-breaking collection brings together the personal narratives of Filipino women writers of several generations. As the authors record the different passages of their lives--growing up, going to school, falling in love, getting married, becoming single again, striking out, earning a living, becoming mothers and grandmothers, surviving war, going away, coming home again--many women readers will find echoes of their own sojourns.

The history of Filipino women writers is an account of how Philippine women became literary "mistresses of the ink" and "lady pen-pushers" who created works of fiction or factual and historical storybooks, poetry, novels, short stories, essays, biographies, autobiographies and other known writing genres. Writing in English, Spanish, Filipino and other local languages and native dialects, female writers from the Philippine archipelago utilized literature, in contrast with the oral tradition of the past, as the living voices of their personal experiences, thoughts, consciousness, concepts of themselves, society, politics, Philippine and world history. They employed the "power of the pen" and the printed word in order to shatter the so-called "Great Grand Silence of the Centuries" of Filipino female members, participants, and contributors to the progress and development of the Philippine Republic, and consequently the rest of the world. Filipino women authors have "put pen to paper" to present, express, and describe their own image and culture to the world, as they see themselves.

During World War II more than one thousand Filipinas were kidnapped by the Imperial Japanese Army. Lolas’ House tells the stories of sixteen surviving Filipino “comfort women.” M. Evelina Galang enters into the lives of the women at Lolas’ House, a community center in metro Manila. She accompanies them to the sites of their abduction and protests with them at the gates of the Japanese embassy. Each woman gives her testimony, and even though the women relive their horror at each telling, they offer their stories so that no woman anywhere should suffer wartime rape and torture. Lolas’ House is a book of testimony, but it is also a book of witness, of survival, and of the female body. Intensely personal and globally political, it is the legacy of Lolas’ House to the world.

Essays af kvindelige filippinske forfattere om kvindespørgsmål, politiske temaer, medierne og pressefriheden, mennesker og begivenheder samt et afsnit om forfatterne