ALCOHOL EN PORCENTAJE

In order to establish an infant health program inspired by the French institutions and practices, Fernando Calderón, needed to gain the support of other social reformers. Similar to other countries like France or the United States, different groups in the Philippines made infant health part of their agenda. High infant mortality as a public health as well as a political topic emerged at a point in time were various movements of social reform intersected and was pushed forward not only by individual reformers, but by a variety of different actors and organizations. Gradually, those different organizations began to cooperate as later chapters of this dissertation will show.

As mapped out at the beginning of this chapter, Calderón spoke before the recently founded Manila Woman’s Club in order to gain support for his propositions. The Manila Woman’s Club became crucial to the early organization of the infant health campaign. The following section deals with the founding of women’s organizations shortly after the American occupation and the significance of those groups for the emergence of the infant health movement. The importance of women and women’s organizations in the Philippines has only been considered cursorily in relation to imperial state building in the Philippines, and therefore, as Denise Cruz remarked, it remains crucial to “underscore the previously unacknowledged importance of femininity in the elites’ responses to imperial transfers of power and to transformations in the Philippine nation-state.”290

The Manila Woman’s Club was one of the first organizations to get involved in public welfare and relief work during the U.S. occupation. On June 30, 1905, several Filipino women met in Manila to found the first Woman’s Club of the Philippine Islands. Concepcion Felix de Calderón, Trinidad Rizal, and Maria de Villamor were among the women who became active both in the early women’s

290 Denise Cruz, Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Durham:

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67 movement and in the fight against infant mortality.291 The major initiator of the

project was Concepcion Felix de Calderón, who taught at the Instituto de Mujeres and at the Hospicio de San Jose and promoted feminist ideas among her fellows and in schools and newspapers. Although the members of the woman’s club were mostly Filipinas, a few Americans, such as the anti-imperialist journalist Helen C. Wilson, supported the organization. Occasionally, prominent American women, such as the wife of Governor General Wright and Alice Roosevelt, attended the meetings of the club.292 While the founding of the club can thus be traced back to Filipinas, the club

itself was also open to American supporters of women’s rights. After the founding of the club in 1905, the organization quickly gained new members, and in the following years new branch clubs were established in other provinces, for example in Bulakan, Malolos and Bocawe. Additional preliminary work for the establishment of new branches was undertaken in Kapis, Negros Oriental, Sebu and Iloilo.293

The objectives of the club were both the political and social advancement of women in general, as well as the establishment of social and educational programs for women and children in need. Concepcion Felix de Calderón stated that lectures for women on rights and obligations as a mother and wife, the care taking of children, housekeeping, domestic science and hygiene were supposed to be part of the program. At the same time, women were to become active in politics and to be nominated for provincial and municipal boards of education. Thereby, women were to shape the educational programs and the politics of their respective

291 On the general meeting on July 23, 1905, Concepcion Felix was elected President of

the Club, Trinidad Rizal became Secretary, as the Treasurer was elected Bonifacia de Barretto. The women composing the original committee who founded the club were Maria de Villamor, Bonifacia de Barretto, Paz viuda de Zulueta, Sofia Reyes, Clemencia Lopez, Helen C. Wilson, Trinidad Rizal and Concepcion Felix de Calderon. Concepcion Felix de Calderón, “First Report of the Philippine Woman’s Club Prepared by the President Concepcion Felix de G. Calderón and Approved by the Board of Directors” (Imp. de EL Recnacimiento Manila, 1907), RG 350 Box 777 (17087), NARA College Park.

292 Calderón. 293 Calderón.

Producing Citizens: Infant Health Programs in the Philippines, 1900-1930

68 communities. “As you know,” Conception Calderón explained, “the aim of our club is twofold; our own benefit and improvement in order that we may better play our woman’s part in society, and also to help our fellow countrywomen. [...] We must seek out our fellow women, become acquainted with them, and understand them, in order that, all standing together, our club may successfully accomplish the objects which it has proposed for itself.”294

Another major focus of the club became the reform of the penitentiary system, as well as the general “moral improvement” of society. The women intended to focus in particular on the distribution of moral and instructive books among prisoners and the repression of vice. At the same time, morals were to be propagated in schools, prostitution was to be repressed, as well as drunkenness, gambling, and “indolence and idleness.”295 Besides the “moral uplift” of society,

the club members were also concerned about working conditions for women and children. They encouraged the introduction of legislation that would prohibit debt slavery. Moreover, they encouraged the reduction of working hours for children and young women under 20. They also agreed to visit factories to examine the working conditions for women. Elite women in this context positioned themselves as reformers of society at large. As their reform attempts were strongly directed towards working class women, the objectives of the club once again show that reform movements in the Philippines were not only shaped by structures of gender and race, but also by formations of class.

The colonial legacy of countries like the Philippines complicates attempts to approach women’s organizations and the suffrage movement from a scholarly perspective.296 Contemporary political opponents of equal voting rights, for

294 Calderón. 295 Calderón.

296 Talking about the women’s movement in Asia is tricky and poses several theoretical

challenges. In general, the amount of scholarship on women’s movements in Asia is still scarce. Some of the exceptions are Cruz, Transpacific Femininities; Louise P. Edwards and Mina Roces, Women’s Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism and Democracy (New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); Mina Roces, “A Century of Women’s Activism in

Producing Citizens: Infant Health Programs in the Philippines, 1900-1930

69 instance, often argued that Philippine women who fought for suffrage were collaborators with the colonial power.297 Philippine men in particular understood

the suffrage movement as a Western or particularly American project.298 For them,

women who engaged in the suffrage movement became too “Americanized.” The reason for that was their understanding of the “new woman” or suffragist as a public-school-educated, English-speaking woman, two criteria which were of course inextricably tied to U.S. rule.299

Women in the Philippines, however, developed several strategies to reconcile the country’s colonial past with their aspirations for suffrage and equal rights. One approach to solve the problem of negotiating the colonial past and suffrage was to reinterpret the pre-colonial past.300 They argued that before

colonization, Philippine women had been active participants of political life and acted alongside men. Moreover, early proponents of women’s rights engaged in a discourse that constructed “the Filipina” as having existed before colonization and having survived colonization without being affected by colonial powers.

Conception Felix de Calderón stated that Philippine history could be easily

the Philippines, 1905-2006,” in Women’s Movements in Asia: Feminisms and Transnational

Activism, ed. Mina Roces and Louise P. Edwards (New York and London: Routledge,

2010); Mina Roces, “Women in Philippine Politics and Society,” in Mixed Blessing: The

Impact of the American Colonial Experience on Politics and Society in the Philippines, ed.

Hazel M McFerson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002).

297 While the first attempts for women’s rights organizations emerged already shortly after

the U.S. occupation, some scholars see in particular the visit of Carrie Chapman Catt in 1912 as a watershed for women’s suffrage. After that, women became increasingly active in the suffrage movement, and by the mid-1920s, the suffrage movement had unfurled. However, while in the United States the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, in the Philippines women achieved the right to vote only in 1937. Roces, “Women in Philippine Politics and Society,” 160.

298 Mina Roces question of whether the suffrage movement or the suffragist as such in the

Philippines was a colonial construct is a reasonable scholarly intervention. Mina Roces, “Is the Suffragist an American Colonial Construct? Defining ‘the Filipino Woman’ in Colonial Philippines,” in Women’s Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism and Democracy (New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004).

299 Roces, 27.

300 See for example Maria Paz Mendoza-Guazon, The Development and Progress of the

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70 divided into three different periods, “the pre-Hispanish period, the Spanish-Filipino period, and the present.”301 In all three periods, she argued, “the positive quality of

the Filipino element has manifested itself most distinctly and foreign domination has never succeeded in destroying it; and in the preservation of the permanent qualities of the indigenous element, it cannot be denied that the Philippine woman has taken an active, though silent part.”302 Moreover, she explained: “The woman

of the purely Philippine element did not lose her original qualities, on the contrary the characteristics observed in her during the pre-Spanish period apparently acquired new vigor, in spite of her lack of education.”303

Thus, through re-imagining the past, those women wrote colonialism out of Philippine history and positioned the suffrage movement as a historical continuity and necessity that existed despite the colonial impact and not as a result thereof. Conception Felix de Calderón saw the Spanish colonial period as particularly harmful in relation to women’s rights. As she explained, during the Spanish colonial period, elite women were restricted to the private sphere and were mere “parlor ornaments”.304 Among historians, a consensus exists that the Spanish era was “a

largely negative era pushing back women’s status in all spheres.”305 Especially the

introduction of Christianity deprived women of their roles as priestesses for example and they were consequently isolated from the public sphere. As Conception Felix de Calderón explained, during the Spanish colonial period, women could choose between “marriage or the cloister.”306 Those changes applied

particularly to upper class women who were now confined to the domestic sphere or to convents (lower class women were still active on markets and in retail

301 Calderón, “First Report of the Philippine Woman’s Club Prepared by the President

Concepcion Felix de G. Calderón and Approved by the Board of Directors.”

302 Calderón. 303 Calderón. 304 Calderón.

305 Roces, “Women in Philippine Politics and Society,” 162.

306 Calderón, “First Report of the Philippine Woman’s Club Prepared by the President

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71 trades).307 During that time, passivity and submission were considered the ideal

qualities for women, and religion was supposed to be their main focus of attention. As Conception Felix de Calderón stated, “it is deeply regretted that the education of these women was so defective; even the daughter of the most privileged class left school with so little real knowledge; as education is so frivolous, as to make her merely a charming but useless bit of bric-a-brac, or as affected and simpering young lady.”308

Also after the American occupation, with the growing educational opportunities and new forms of organization such as the women’s clubs that were similar to the American predecessors, women increasingly claimed their place in the public sphere.309 As Conception Felix de Calderón explained: “But although up

to the present time our sphere has been purely domestic, now that our country is entering upon a new era, now that our people are fired by new desires and ambitions, we Philippine women also aspire to a new and broader life. We contemplate exercising our influence not only in the home and in the family, but also in solving the social problem before us.”310

Even though organizational structures like the women’s clubs were similar to U.S. organizations, women created a distinct image of the modern Filipina within this framework. As Mina Roces showed, prominent women in particular tended to reinforce traditional gender roles while at the same time they took advantage of newly emerging gender formations.311 As traditional feminine images of the

Filipina, beauty queens for instance, were accepted in the public sphere, women used those roles and positions to push the boundaries and to become active in public

307 Roces, “Women in Philippine Politics and Society,” 163.

308 Calderón, “First Report of the Philippine Woman’s Club Prepared by the President

Concepcion Felix de G. Calderón and Approved by the Board of Directors.”

309 Roces, “Women in Philippine Politics and Society,” 160.

310 Calderón, “First Report of the Philippine Woman’s Club Prepared by the President

Concepcion Felix de G. Calderón and Approved by the Board of Directors.”

311 Roces, “Is the Suffragist an American Colonial Construct? Defining ‘the Filipino

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72 life.312 Navigating between “the old” and “the new,” as well as emphasizing

maternal qualities, women in the Philippines managed to become active in social reform movements such as the infant welfare campaign. Gota de Leche became one of the first projects that emerged in this context of reform.