Can women change history?

Sometime ago I made a graduate school report on the livelihood of Samal women. Little did I know that years later I would become an advocate of women’s rights because of my work with the DILG and assistant secretary Austere Panadero. My report was timely because it revealed the women’s importance and the messages they reveal through pottery.

What is the future direction of women in ethnography? Every anthropologist and ethnographer has his own thrust. I believe this because I am a perennial student of Dr. Realidad Rolda. More emphasis must be put on women as sources of historical information. Wouldn’t it be challenging to investigate the evolution of females from our original pure ethnic form to emphasize what our women ancestors did that transformed women to what they are now?

I think so.

The Samal women and their pottery- making occupation is an excellent source of history and ethnography on clay. What would have been invisible in the writing of Filipino history was made obvious in their daily hardware. Fe Mangahas, an advocate of women’s rights, called my attention to that and I appreciated it. So taking Dr. Alexander Sopher’s study on contemporary Samal pottery as takeoff point and using the feminist framework I discovered a number of significant things about the Samal women who had seafaring husbands.

One learns from Sopher’s study, for example, that the Samals were the only ethnic group in the Zamboanga-Sulu area who engaged in the manufacture of pottery which was done only by their women. There is nothing written about the tradition of pottery-making among Zamboangeños. But Yakan, Tausug, Badjao, and a few Subanum of Sindangan made pottery like cooking pots up to 1906.

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Sopher noted that women were the active potters and there were no men who engaged in pottery-making either as a hobby or trade. Pottery-making was a woman’s occupation based on ocular fieldwork and antiquities. From digging the clay, to the last steps of firing it, women performed the task. It was by no means an easy task. Note the following vigorous steps involved in the making of Samal pottery by the women since the 19th century.

Each woman potter went to the clay source which was Tawi Tawi in the very early centuries. On the surface she dug her own clay, loaded it into a burlap sack or a basket, put the burden on her head, and trudged home. The clay itself was free, except for those available in Simunul. Upon reaching her house, she dumped the clay into a section of an old canoe hull for storage. The potter chopped the clay with a knife and removed any small pebbles. Otherwise the clay was not refined but cleaned in its natural state. After bringing the clay home, the women kept it moist and covered it with coconut leaves.

How did she prepare the clay?

The potter took a piece of clay about the size of a small loaf of bread, doused it with a little water, and kneaded it with her fingers, adding water during the kneading until the loaf of clay became a soft and sticky mass. The water used was seawater, because fresh water was scarce. Next, the potter worked a small amount of sand temper into the loaf. The temper is fine beach sand, derived from coral or coral limestone. The potter continued to add sand temper, as well as water, while kneading until the clay felt right. No measuring devices were used. Kneading the clay was done on an old pandanus (pandan plant) mat. The potter made about a dozen loaves of prepared clay or as many as she thought she would need for making the vessels she intended to fabricate that day. As Alexander Sopher in Zamboanga and Sulu: An Archaeological Approach to Ethnic Diversity, Pittsburgh, explained.

Pottery-making is labor-intensive, requiring a great amount of patience, considering that details are done individually. Only women engaged in it, therefore, making it a women’s craft. This statement should be expounded as stated. The occupation was categorized as a "women’s craft". The fact that Sopher referred to pottery makers with the pronoun indicated that pottery-making for him was done by women.

From a feminist’s perspective, I realized that these so-called objective statements or observations in the study of pottery may not be objective at all. Questions arose. How come no mention is made of the earthen-made pots and stoves among the products exchanged in the busy Sulu market centers of the day? How come none of the pottery products produced by the Samal groups were ever found in the transactions recorded in documents?

One probable reason has to do with the fact that pottery-making was predominantly a woman’s activity, it was also only for domestic consumption. The male writer or recorder of the period probably thought them worthless as compared with the beauty and value in the prices of gold, pearls, trepang and slaves that were exchanged for guns, saltpeter, silks, perfumes, tea and other products from China and Europe.

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Sopher also observed that the Samal potters worked at home or near their residence. Women actually worked on old pandamus mats spread out under their houses, with simple wooden racks meant for drying and storing vessels. She kept her tools and supplies of clay, sand temper and a tin of water in the same place. However, it takes a feminist perspective to deduce that the women potters did not only work at their craft but did other things in between. For instance, while waiting for the pots to dry, she engaged in tasks associated with the household like cooking, washing, fetching water and looking after the young children. Those observations do not appear in Sopher’s text because his framework did not consider the role of women. Perhaps his predominantly male view obscured the fact that women have always had a double burden of responsibility – home and work.

Furthermore, with the feminist approach there emerged the issue of women’s income and social status declining with the importation of pots and pans, a task which the men indulged in. As a result foreign goods displaced the local products and dislocated the potters who were women. Women, already marginalized in the public sphere were now pushed out of the economy. Worse, they became confined to the domestic/private domain thus reinforcing the traditional view that the women’s place is in the home.

This to me is a sad state considering that the women’s pottery skills were handed down from mothers to daughters. More than losing an occupation a treasured tradition was lost due to the decrease in sales of pottery, and with it came the loss of the women’s potential source of empowerment.

Because of this sad state of research on women there is a need to push for more feminist studies in the various social sciences where women can be equally significant sources of history and culture.

In the Samal masters study I made, I saw broken pieces of these pots in Balangingi Island preserved for years, lying broken on the beach. Without these archaeological findings it would have been nearly impossible to know or guess that those shards were produced by women’s hands as seen through their rich imagination and intricate designs.

Women should become subjects of history. But what can a writer of history do in the face of such documents that have silenced women? Following are some suggestions from me.

One, find out why the silence on women.

Two, search for more archaeological evidence about women, their crafts, rituals, arts, epics and legends.

Three, look for the survivors among women who were branded bad or crazy, often relegated to the records as criminals and suicide victims. They can tell stories on women’s lives and struggles. Perhaps, these women were branded as such because they voiced out opinions or behaved in such a way that was too ahead for their time.

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In the Samal Balangingi study, I made, it is striking to note that the interviewees among Samal Muslims in Isabela were all women. Women had stories to tell about their ancestor’s escape to freedom from their place of exile. It was the Samal Balangingi women who continued to practice the boat ceremony in far-away and landlocked Isabela despite the passage of time. What do these observations signify? I concluded in my thesis that culture dies hard. Now with the feminist perspective I can add that women who were the main participants in this activity were actually responsible for the preservation of culture remembering the minute details which men may brush aside and forget. Women, therefore, are more reliable bearers of a people’s memory through oral rather than written traditions. Although pushed to the margins of production and politics women can provide an alternative and complete view of history. Mabuhay kayo!

Anthropologists like Malinowski stressed that we should study a "primitive society not as an isolated integrated society, but as a society, but as a society undergoing drastic culture change or acculturation." And women are affected by many changes. We look forward to "ethnography of the present" which allows women and peoples to have influence on the colonial control and technology. I believe that we women have the richness and strength of culture and history to back us up in our attempt to stay whole and dynamic vis-à-vis a complex and fast changing world we must adjust to. After all women are the source and heart of all human beings.