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CHAPTER 2 ◆ Becoming a Global Kind of Woman AROUND THE WORLD, WHAT women do and don’t do—and how they look while doing it—is evidence of civilization and development and a matter of national pride. To understand the Philippines, with its landbased migrant labor force predominantly composed of women, we need to understand why and how village women, who are the majority of the country’s peasant and working-class female migrants, approach both being women and becoming overseas migrants. Thus we need to explore how women’s work and social roles have changed over time and learn how women come to understand themselves with and against different models of femininity. In 1990s Haliap, women found themselves unable to enact proper Filipina, or housewife, identities when at home and dreamed that working abroad would make them over into their own global kind of woman. These dreams no doubt expressed feelings of frustration and inadequacy they shared with women elsewhere in the Philippines and across the developing world—women considered too poor, too backward, or too uneducated to really matter in the public life of their nation. During my stay in Haliap, I learned that gender gave a particular shape to progress. Though women were not the figures of anticolonial resistance or global migration portrayed in the parade, my early 1990s interviews with local elders retrieved oral histories that were populated by female actors, and my household surveys indicated that women comprised the majority of the village’s overseas migrants. But local ideas of global femininity were both powerful and proscriptive. In 1996, Peter, a former Haliap barangay captain, completed an interview about local history, and his comments sparked my curiosity. To the question “What improvements have Haliap people experienced since before the Spanish time?” he had replied, “Bras and panties for women.” Was he serious? Was he teasing, resisting what he may have found to be an intrusive question? When I asked Peter to explain, he said that wearing underwear was what people had learned about progress from the Americans. He then cautioned me against drying my own bras and panties on the clothesline under the trees outside my rented house, in case “someone would steal them.” So should I have understood this as a profound insight, progress being best encapsulated by undergarments that nobody should actually see but that shaped the female body into a more acceptable and attractive form? At the nearest market I examined the bras on 42 ◆ GLOBAL FILIPINOS sale. All had formed cups that promised the wearer a shapely bustline; a woman ’s own natural shape was apparently inadequate. Peter’s comments suggested that femininity—how women performed themselves as gendered—acted as a powerful and widely accepted metaphor for progress. Angelina Seeking women’s thoughts on the shape of bras and progress, I found single women in their mid-twenties scarce. The census told me that many of them were away completing education, working in the lowland urban centers, or seeking work abroad.1 Married women were busy with their businesses or their farming and rarely had much time for a regular woman-to-woman chat with me, then single and childless. I went to the shops—called sari-sari stores—on the main road, where people hung around. The female shopkeepers could chat while they worked. My friend Otag Manghi, known as Angelina, owned one of these sari-sari stores. Angelina had grown up in Haliap but left in her mid-teens as what Filipinos call a working student. She did domestic work for the household of distant cousins in the lowlands while completing her high school education. She then enrolled in college for two years of midwifery training; however, her parents could not afford to fund her third year of college. She had learned that it was very difficult for qualified midwives to find work. Haliap had several unemployed midwifery graduates, and there were already too many applicants for the jobs available in Asipulo, so Angelina decided against returning to college. Her parents gave her part of her inheritance early, before her marriage, so that she could support herself . This inheritance was a plot of land along the main road and a small amount of money with which to build and stock a sari-sari store. Angelina’s parents also engaged a traditional matchmaker to find her a husband. She became engaged to Mark, the youngest son of one of Haliap’s comparatively better-off families...

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