Women Writers

Homage to Leona Florentino

For their part, some women like Leona Florentino continued the tradition of indigenous writing outside the Christian religion during the 19th century. Leona Florentino was a polyglot Ilocano writer. We preserve some of her poems because her son, Isabelo de los Reyes, translated them and included them in his work El folk-lore filipino.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, women's writings were crucial to conceptualize the Philippine nation and the history of Philippine feminism. At the end of the 19th century, Spanish women started to write in Philippine newspapers and publish their fiction and poetry proposing their ideas on the role of the Filipina in society. These narratives portrayed a Christian view of the women's social role but, at the same time, although still reproducing a colonial mentality, their discourse was deviant from the male’s colonial sexualization of the conquest and the Indigenous woman (McClintock 1995; Pratt 1992). The presence of these fictions in the first women's magazines and their circulation in educational establishments until the early 20th century ensured that they reached the next generation of Philippine women writers.

Enriqueta Lozano, “Amor que redime"

After the American invasion, there was a peak in women’s associationist movements and in the creation of magazines for women (Reyes Encanto 2004; Villaescusa 2022). These associations and magazines promoted a triple insertion, this time of Philippine women in the public sphere: (1) through the suffragist movement and the involvement of women in the independence of the nation, (2) through the promotion of charity work as a social obligation of women to contribute to the progress of their country, (3) through the postcolonial writings that combined stressing the importance of precolonial identity and the inspiration in foreign countries to advance the development of the Philippines in a modern (westernized) world. 

Initially, literary pieces written by women were published either in the “Home” section of most newspapers or in magazines devoted to a feminine public, such as La mujer, The Woman’s Outlook, The Woman’s Home Journal, The Weekly Women’s Magazine or The Woman’s World.

Nuestras Prosistas del Presente y del Porvenir

By those days, and especially from the early 1930s women were starting to be appreciated as skillful writers in all the languages of the archipelago. Interestingly, in the listings of women writers appearing in books and press, they would include women who had published no books, but just articles, discourses, or editorials in newspapers. Some of the highlighted authors of narrative in the 1930s were  Rosa Sevilla de Alvero, Alicia Palma, Celia Canseco, Natividad Almeida de López, and Paz Mendoza Guazón.

Dr. Mendoza Guazón was a strong political and feminist activist who traveled around the world publishing her chronicles in various Philippine newspapers (Mendoza Guazón 1930; Villaescusa 2018). Another famous writer in Spanish was Evangelina Guerrero. She promoted an image of the Filipina as deviant from the María Clara stereotype idealized by men in her tales published in Excelsior. Philippine feminism was, however, a transcultural women’s movement that distilled local, colonial, and international sources in its identity (Villaescusa 2020).