Women writing history

I associate the word “jurassic” with dinosaurs and cavemen, my students associate the same term with me, or my course requirements. Digging up the newspaper on the day they were born is an adventure in time travel, the primary source “archival” to them. The Inquirer from 1990 isn’t archival for me as 17th century documents on the Philippines preserved in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain.

Unlike people born in the last century who gathered news from: radio, television, newspapers, or the neighborhood “Maritess,” my students receive news in curated bits from their social media feeds. Analog newspapers are antiques to them. I grew up with newspapers at home. In Grade 6, our classrooms were supplied with the day’s newspaper from which we drew facts to pass quizzes on “Current Events.” I learned how to fold and glue old newspapers into “supot” from my grandmother who bundled them up daily to be sold to market vendors.

The teaser for my column appears on my Facebook feed faster than I can type inquirer.net on my browser. My students don’t need newspapers and books to pass a quiz these days, they have Google, Gemini, and Claude to help them out. I do not see the end of the book or reading because people are reading more today than they did when the Gutenberg bible was first printed in 1455. What we have is not the death of reading but the problem of a deluge of information bigger than we can humanly absorb.

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When I look back on four decades of writing Philippine history, I recall the countless travel accounts of the Philippines I have read from Antonio Pigafetta’s account of the Magellan expedition in 1521 and Zhao Rugua’s references to the islands and people in the 13th century that would later become part of the Philippines to various chronicles and firsthand accounts in the Spanish period (1565-1898), the American period (1898-1946), and the postwar period.

At one point I focused on American period material, particularly books written by women beginning from the first memoir of the American first lady, “Recollections of Full Years” by Helen Herron Taft (1914) that has a section on her husband’s time in Manila as the first American civil governor of the Philippines. There were other women who accompanied their husbands here like Emily Bronson Conger who published “An Ohio Woman in the Philippines” in 1904 or Nanon Fay Worcester, wife of the infamous Dean C. Worcester whose letters from the Philippines should be compiled and published as a book sometime.

American teachers who wrote about their time in the Philippines include Mary H. Fee who published “A Woman’s Impressions of the Philippines” in 1910 and Josephine Craig, whose letters were excerpted from and published posthumously by her brother, the historian Austin Craig, as “Farthest Westing: A Philippine Footnote” in 1940. Brother and sister kept correspondence of their stay from 1903-1935.

Finding Josephine’s letters in the Minnesota State Historical Society made me appreciate the missionary zeal that brought American teachers to the Philippines in the early 1900s. Josephine arrived in Manila in October 1906. She was billeted in the Delmonico Hotel whose inner court was “filled with orchids and palms, and a squawking parrot. The floor is mosaic, there are large wicker chairs and two beds with mosquito nettings over them…” Her first impressions are quite romantic, colored by a calesa ride around Intramuros at dusk, that set the churches in moonlight.

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Josephine was assigned to Mindoro with her brother, in a nice house where her security at night was a baseball bat under the bed. She taught music with a phonograph, lyrics of songs transcribed on the blackboard, and the Filipino students had very sharp ears for “oido” that they copied the tune perfectly, down to the “whirr at the end where the needle runs wild.”

She did not confine herself to the classroom and started on village improvements in Lubang, starting with cleaning up the cemetery and painting the town church with “yellow kalsomine with red Maltese crosses which, in the cathedral-like building, gives a pleasing effect.” Unlike the Spanish period educational system, no religious or “sectarian” instruction was allowed. She noted that “here everybody is Catholic, even the forty masons.”

To set a good example, she attended church, with no priest, just old men reciting prayers in Latin. When the sacristan noticed that she upholstered a side of the kneeler to “save martyrdom of my marrow bones,” he offered her a cushion used at weddings that cost P50. She ordered rosary beads from Binondo and got free catechism from Manila, then she rewarded those who learned the catechism in English with a rosary. “The idea worked so well,” she says, “that old ladies had their grandchildren teach them.”

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August being Buwan ng Wika, we should look back on early American public instruction to see how they propagated English in the islands in less than half a century, while Spanish was spoken by a small minority after close to four centuries. We have so much to learn from the past, if we know what to focus on.

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Comments are welcome at ambeth.ocampo@inquirer.net