Women must fight patriarchal forces that abuse and exploit

Editor’s note: The late Alex Tizon was a Filipino- American author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His last article, “My Family’s Slave,” in the June issue of The Atlantic, is about Eudocia “Lola” Tomas Pulido: “She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.”

———

On last week’s episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu, the new world learned the real name of Offred, who had been renamed “of Fred” to signify the Commander she serves. Unlike June, “Lola” (nee Eudocia) from The Atlantic article did not get to tell us her story — and when it was told, it was to sell magazines and make a man’s credentials better. Eudocia didn’t even get ownership of her own story — this is why many women in our circles cannot get through reading Alex Tizon’s piece.

The commentary emerging is giving all the glory and power to the author for having the bravery to tell his personal story of an evil family. We were disturbed by much, especially the author’s victim-blaming and expectation that Lola tell him about her sex life. There was never an apology to her family. It shows that storytelling only goes so far.

To say that the author gave her agency is to assuage our own guilt. How is this any different from “The Help”? We should not center our struggles around coming to terms with our own privilege.

We must instead, in the words of Filipina novelist Ninotchka Rosca, end these practices which “served at one point as poverty escape valves — but became rife with abuses and exploitation.”

To do this, we will have to fight a hard battle against capitalism to “entitle everyone to free education, free health care, free housing, etc., because when the most basic of human rights is monetized, then we have slavery — from outright slavery in banana plantations to individualized slavery in the household to wage slavery.

“We must simultaneously fight against patriarchy and white supremacy because these basic human rights must not be distributed on any racial or gendered axis. This will require a trans- national feminist movement. Look to the organizations that are doing the actual work to build it.”

We are glad that this article disrupted our innocence and exposed our big Filipino secret: a present-day caste system of “helpers” whose lives cannot leave the orbit of the richer. It was a visceral indictment of Filipino culture. We have to own that. It is time to say, “I am complicit.” It is absolutely unacceptable that we continue to funnel millions of women into household work as the end-all point of their lives.

There are so many complicated layers to unpack: Not the tale of a poor, unwitting woman or the “slave” hyperbole, but how we all survive capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy and resist it while none of us have clean hands.

We grew up around this culture. We saw child servants, mainly young girls, sent to work for a richer family. We know the lamentation practice, the dung-aw, the dirge. This culture is built on a feudal sense of entitlement from the working class to those who get to pay for others to do the “dirty women’s work.” This is about how certain care and labor is feminized and beneath certain people.

Housework should not be the ultimate destiny for poor women of color. Child care must be socialized. Work inside the home, while it can be made decent, is numbing, repetitive and brutal to the human spirit and body.

In the worst cases, women report wearing three or four pairs of underwear at night to guard against rape, a common occupational hazard when the power balance is so askew. We refuse the term “domestic worker” for the same reasons we refuse “sex worker.”

We must destroy our patriarchal relationships to sex and household, not enter them, because all women have the right to dream.

The authors are Filipinas in Hawaii and progeny of women like Eudocia “Lola” Tomas Pulido. Khara Jabola is public affairs director of Strategies 360; Nadine Ortega, J.D., is a lecturer at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and co-founder of AF3IRM Hawai’i; Mykie Ozoa is a recent graduate of the William S. Richardson School of Law.