Friday Letters: but this time lines of poetry

We have always read in books especially those dealing with the female gender that women in the past didn’t have the same privileges and rights that we enjoy now and sometimes take for granted. We have read a lot of stories, most of them horror stories to the modern readers’ eyes, those sufferings of women in terms of being treated as objects to serve their family with the view of acquiring more power in the name of ‘marriage’ it happened not just in royal families but also in those families with noble bloods or those in trading field. We know of women who were never given a proper identification in history, those not treated as citizens, as exemplified in the Greek community – only the men were considered citizens therefore they had the exclusive right to decide for everyone. Those practices in other cultures where the wives will be buried alive along with their dead husbands. There was a time when women weren’t permitted to vote, weren’t allowed to enter libraries, weren’t allowed to go to school. Even in English language, we based the word women from the word men, female from the word male. It is like we are always defining ourselves as the other, we are not of males, therefore we must be females, expertly eradicating or devaluing anything unique that comes from being a female. Automatically placing our identity below or underneath the ‘standard,’ which is the male. It is in these very unfair standards, that even now women unconsciously surrender their power/authority to this deep conditioning, that the wonderful essay of Ursula Leguin, Introducing Myself was molded and has taken shape.

One thing in particular that I am most curious about is the inequality that women faced in receiving education. The books I have read about the history of education would more than oftentimes talk about males going to school, teaching in schools or academies, males doing research or writing or copying books, males discovering earth-shaking concepts or writing theories or treatises. The monopoly of males in the early days of education is not something that one overlooks. Let’s look at the early days of education in the Philippines, with the Spaniards bringing with them the Christian religion, they started setting up seminaries and then eventually large catholic schools in many parts of the country. These were our earliest form of schooling in Spanish colonial period, and of course, they were exclusive to males. Most of the Filipino thinkers who came from rich families got their education from these catholic schools/universities, and what about their sisters? The sisters mostly stayed home, learning domestic chores, tending to the daily needs of the family: cooking, washing dishes, washing clothes while their brothers went on to become doctors, philosophers, writers, priests, painters, lawyers, teachers, professors etc. We only started admitting Filipino females in schools in early 1900s, barely a hundred years. Therefore, if we look at it more closely, in our country, we are barely at the third or fourth generation of living the concept of the educated independent woman, free to choose the life she wants to live as she can study freely and earn freely and express herself freely in the 21^st century.

~

However, in such view of the old ways which is a kind of a grim picture for women all over the world that I want to tell a story about this particular woman. In the darkness of the past, women who were denied education or even denied basic rights to lead independent lives in the early centuries struggled hard to survive and flourish, some of them refusing the role forced upon them to play. It is in this grim background that I marvel at some courageous souls who dared to find a way to go against the prevailing norms and tried to live in the light, refusing to be confined in the constricting binds of the moral codes unjustly bestowed upon them. One of the names that floated was that of Veronica Franco (1546-1591), an Italian cortigiana onesta, an honored courtesan and a poet. She was raised by her mother who was also a courtesan, her intellectual life was nourished from sharing with her brothers’ education by private tutors. She was soon married to Paolo Panizza, an arranged union, which of course was the norm during that time because the radical concept of marrying for love only started around late 18^th to early 19^th century. She asked to be separated from him soon after, and she went on to become a famous poet and of course a courtesan to the elite.

As a poet, her words were filled with passion, bordering on erotic. Most of the subjects of her poems were based on her engagements with her clients and also there were some recordings of her everyday life, deemed to be a rich resource of the life of those in the same profession in that period of time. Let’s try to read some of the lines:

I confess I became a courtesan, traded yearning for power, welcomed many rather than be owned by one. I confess I embraced a whore's freedom over a wife's obedience. I confess I find more ecstasy in passion than in prayer. Such passion is prayer. I confess I pray still to feel the touch of my lover's lips. His hands upon me, his arms enfolding me... Such surrender has been mine. I confess I pray still to be filled and enflamed.

                                                                -       From the movie A Destiny of her Own

Despite the religious undertones (using words like confess, prayer, surrender), we can easily read her all-consuming passion about being one with her lover. And she was just expressing what she truly feels. As indicated, the lines were taken from the movie, A Destiny of her Own a biographical film about Veronica Franco, which was released in 1992. A movie hailed by critics as a tale told from a woman’s point of view. However, many readers/watchers would have found it too erotic for a woman to feel, to express or to experience.

I wonder, would we even feel somewhat repulsed if these words came from a man and not a woman?

Once again, we can see this constricting standard on how women should behave in the society, what role must a woman play to be a respectable one. In this case a woman must be an obedient wife, which Veronica deliberately refused. But is it just because she wants another role to play, she is already wrong? Should a woman always try to fit the mold shaped for her without questioning why there is a mold in the first place? Should a woman live her life according to the expectations of others?

Another angle that I want us to look at is the age-old woman trope of the virgin and the temptress. The ideal woman is always the virgin and the fallen one is always the temptress. In this ultra-modern hyper-fast technological world, did we ever walk away from this dichotomy of what a woman must be? Is a thinking woman who wants to follow another path and in the process refusing to fit into the mold that was shaped for her will always be considered a temptress? And is the virgin will always be the obedient one, not thinking for herself, but she who will gladly go into the tight mold without any will to question why is it even there?

I believe women are far more complicated than any trope. It is not just black and white, there are huge spaces in between for gray areas.

sources:
https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/IWW/BIOS/A0017.html
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/17/ursula-k-le-guin-gender/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Beauty
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/10-tropes-about-women-women-should-stop-laughing-about/325782/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42634820?seq=1