A toast to our kind of women
They rediscovered their artistic talents and homemaking skills while realizing that they could do business and practice their professions at home.
In the past century, women, especially of society, were recognized for their beauty and elegance, alongside their flair for grooming and sophistication. If merited, and at all, given almost equal attention were their scholarship and leadership, as well as their talent and brilliance especially in often stereotyped male professions and fields.
Of course, women were expected to be knowledgeable of the home making arts and sciences, including the culinary arts, interior decoration, hosting a dinner in one’s home and the fine arts.
Of the members of the cosmopolitan set, one spoke a second language or third, had to have traveled the world, and served in socio-civic committees. One learned of these things especially in the educational institutions run by nuns although they were exposed as much to the rigors of academic discipline. Even if many were expected to marry a prize catch and be the chatelaine in a southern hacienda or a gated village in the suburbs.
The rise of feminism in the late 1960s to the 1980s, all the way to the end of the millennium, brought a new awareness of what women are capable of. More women became professionals, business tycoons, military officers, pilots and top-level engineers and scientists.
The distinction between the masculine and feminine, while still pronounced, in many instances has become blurred due to freedom of thought, choice and preference. Within the upper echelons, women have come out of the dining room or rumpus room, and have instead taken their appropriate places in the boardrooms and in their own stores, shops or ateliers.
While the women of our social set remain to be club members and officers, fashion trendsetters and lifestyle icons, a great majority in the last 20 years have explored the universe beyond their homes and dressing rooms.
While the women of our social set remain to be club members and officers, fashion trendsetters and lifestyle icons, a great majority in the last 20 years have explored the universe beyond their homes and dressing rooms. You find them everywhere occupying key positions although, of late, they have been halted by the pandemic.
In the privacy of their homes, though, they continue to be empowered. They communicate with other women, engage in home-based and talent-inspired businesses, and bond with the other family members.
For the longest time, they have been prominently defined and labeled as executives and magnates, investment bankers and editors, architects and pediatricians, but with the quarantine getting in the way of the usual schedule of humanity, these women, active and admired, respected and emulated, have returned to where they have always been at home.
Taking to their homes like fish to water, many found it easy reforming home chores again, as though they were born for the purpose, although this time, their role is no longer confined to taking care of their husbands and children.
They now realize that even as they perform the responsibilities of a woman in her own paradise or corner of the sky, they also can do something profitable, exercise their imaginative minds, create with their hands and contribute to the well-being of the community, while taking time to console and put a smile on the faces of the front-liners braving the lurking unrecognizable virus.
With this special supplement of the 20th anniversary of Daily Tribune, we are presenting 12 ladies we believe epitomize the woman who, in the last 20 years, has evolved and blossomed into the total person that she is, one who embodies the confidence, ingenuity, self-respect, credibility and charm of the Filipina whose talents and traits fit the requirements of these interesting, if challenging, times.
To the women of this century, especially those who have come of age in the last 20 years, we toast you for your great achievements at home, work, in the community, your nation and in the world.