When Turtles Come Home

by Victoria Hoffarth

  Still another woman faculty member found a niche by acting as a conduit between the students and higher management, passing on information about issues of importance to both groups, whilst filling the role of a mother-figure sounding board.

  We had regular faculty meetings and I wondered why, when I had provided what I thought was a really clever idea, it was never taken up by the group. It was as if I hadn’t said anything. I started thinking that perhaps I wasn’t so clever after all until, during one meeting, exactly the same idea was proposed a couple of minutes later by a well-liked male colleague and a long, lively discussion ensued. I also noticed that none of the other women faculty joined in these discussions, but instead sat silently in some corner. After that observation I, too, kept quiet, and often joined these women to have lunch at the faculty lounge instead of the faculty dining room where the men ate. On the one hand, this closed an important channel of information on the goings-on at the school. On the other hand, it spared us the pressure of having to laugh at the sexual jokes of our bosses.

  Possibly the most insidious experience I had—I even have a term for it—is called the “queen bee” syndrome. Sometimes when the number of women in levels of managerial positions is low, destructive competition arises and women start defending their turf from would-be encroachers, i.e. from other women. This is especially true in the case of tokenism because women incumbents for these token positions feel insecure about their own capabilities. They keep their would-be competitors at bay by denying them access to necessary facilities, circulating false information, grabbing credit not due them, or, indeed, employing any other political manoeuvres that serve their purposes.

  In my own case, it didn’t help that I was considered aggressive, and that I was going it alone instead of forming alliances. I was telling my students that hard work and competence would get them up to middle management, but that they had to learn political skills if they wanted to go higher. Yet I wasn’t following my own advice. Finally, after three years into the project, I quit. I followed my father’s advice not to “put up with such nonsense” and that if I were willing to work hard I should work for myself. He was correct, of course. Needing a great deal of autonomy, I realised that I was not cut out for organisational life and, consequently, did much better on my own.

  Nevertheless, one of my last shreds of comfort before departing was, however, that my achievements seemed to have been finally acknowledged by management. Heretofore overlooked was the fact that I was consistently getting one of the top third in student forced rankings, an important indicator for faculty performance appraisal. Additionally—and not as easily overlooked—was the project’s visibility in the media: it was one of the first of its kind in Southeast Asia. Previous studies were focused on women-in-development—such as the poor and the physically abused women, their tasks in agricultural settings, and their participation in the labour force. WMBO was instead concerned with women in leadership positions. We were in the papers and magazines across the region, thanks mainly to the prominent women managers who were included in our project. We organised a well-attended international conference and were surprised at the interest it generated. Later, we created an NGO called Women for Women (WOW) Foundation with highly visible women in the ASEAN region as members. An audience with President Corazon Aquino added a badge of prestige to this fledgeling organisation . WOW’s aim wasmentorship for women by women. We had thought one key obstacle to the ad vanceme nt of w omen was lack of mentorship, but that once women who had “made it” learned to mentor and to train other women, a multiplier effect would create a critical mass among women corpo rate managers , doing away with tokenism and “queen bee ” syndromes. 13

  It was some form of outside recognition that hinted at what could have been a turning of the tables for me. During one of my last days at the institute, at the time when the Philippines was having a highly tumultuous military coup, I proposed that the best way forward was for us to transfer to Singapore. I was surprised when my remarks were not only recognised but taken seriously. The school president answered that he didn’t know how other faculty members felt, but the Philippines was his home and he would never leave his country. I smiled to myself. Ah, the sweetness of little victories!

  A year or so after then, I was deciding on whether to leave for Nanyang University in Singapore where I was offered a similar job or for London to follow my husband. Sadly, I later heard that after I left, neither the WMBO project nor the WOW Foundation survived. The good news is that I also heard there have since been several women deans.

  I, a Woman

  What does being a woman mean to me? As a woman working in an organisation headed by men, I had problems competing with them. Members of the WOW Foundation used to joke that women had to work twice as hard as men and be twice as smart; fortunately, we also agreed that was not a very hard thing to do.

  The years at the business school were arguably the time in my life when I worked the hardest with the least At that time, I valued the latter even more. The frustrations I felt, however, were also an opportunity for me to learn that recognition was not essential for my self-fulfillment after all. My needs changed even as I myself changed. I discovered I loved being self-employed—relishing the flexibility and the autonomy it afforded me. It was a long journey but I finally came home to roost.

  With increased self-awareness, I am now able to go out into the Philippine world and observe as from the outside. If it is true that the Philippines was a matriarchy before the patriarchal colonists came, some four centuries of male-oriented rule have certainly taken a major toll on the role of women in Philippine society today. Although social class and family connections are even more important than gender in achieving career success, collectively, Filipinas as elsewhere still suffer overt discrimination. I must have been aware of this even then, but I accepted and worked around it. For example, I would insist that my husband accompany me whenever I had a major problem at the school in order to show to my superiors that I had my husband’s support. It helped that they regarded him as a figure of authority working in a large, prestigious organisation.

  Nowadays, I am pleased to observe that within family firms, even though males are still favoured over females, in cases where the woman is considered more competent, it is not unusual that she, not her brother, succeed their father to become de-facto top honcho. Filipinos are, after all, still a practical people.

  I am currently a member of a golf club in Manila. There are only about a dozen of us women out of some 500 or so members. (Most of the other regular women players are spouses, having partial rights.) The club is elitist with a deep sense of hierarchy and a steep power structure, constituting a microcosm of Philippine society. Early on, my husband had cautioned me to simply play and keep my head down. Following that advice, I have not run into any significant problems. I mostly play alone, except during the once-a-year big tournament when I can invite a partner—in the hope we could at least win some of the beautiful raffle prizes.

  In these competitions, two large balls are sunk into the ground to demarcate the place where all participants should tee off. This includes us female participants. It is possible that some women could be as physically strong as men, especially against the older male members of the club, but as far as I know, there has never been a woman who has made a hole-in-one (usually awarded by a brand new car!), let alone being amongst the winners of the competition. When I mentioned to a board member of the club that it was not fair that women are made to start from the same tee as the men, he answered that we ladies should simply play and enjoy ourselves. Of course I don’t know whether this was discrimination against women or against minority members, or possibly both. At any rate, I finally wrote a letter addressed to the tournament committee proposing that we female members only pay half the tournament fee since we only have half the chance of winning any awards, if that. For whatever reason, the head of our ladies branch decided not to pass it on. P
erhaps, she thought there was no sense in fighting a battle you know you cannot win. On the flip side, I have noted some advances made by women—one step at a time—especially as younger, less traditional men take over the reins of management.

  Be that as it may, it doesn’t take away from my sense of who I am. Perhaps it only comes with age and experience, but knowing and accepting who you are, you can stand tall and be at peace with yourself and with the world.

  Six

  Where Is Heaven?

  A Spiritual Quest

  … Then the Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.” He answered them, … You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said: ‘These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts’.

  Matthew 15:2-3,7-9 NRSVCE

  Manila, 2010

  The French philosopher Voltaire once said that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. This is because, he reasons, humans are basically religious animals.

  Is God a human invention, simply a figment of our imagination because we need to believe? If we didn’t believe, how else could we explain the wonders of nature or the miracle of our lives? How else could we address our deepest fear, that after death, we—our consciousness, our memories—will cease to exist? Yet, judging from the universality of religious beliefs, perhaps this very need to believe is instilled in our genes by, yes, by the power of God. He has made us religious creatures so that indeed our hearts are restless until they rest in Him, to paraphrase Augustine of Hippo.

  This is the story of my internal journey, starting from trusting in simple articles of faith—obey the Church’s commandments, die a holy death, and you will go to heaven where you will have life everlasting—to where I am now, in some kind of a halfway house straddling belief and unbelief. Further, I ask myself, belief or unbelief in what? In the Roman Catholic Church? In institutional religion? Assuming that I believe in God, if I were to say that I am a Christian, does that mean that I have to believe that Jesus Christ is God incarnate? Or is it sufficient to believe that he was a good person who revolutionised the way we were taught to live our lives, and that, in order to be a Christian, it is enough to believe in and to follow his teachings? Additionally, assuming that I believe in a God who loves, how do I relate to this ineffable being unless I endow Him with anthropomorphic qualities similar to mine, albeit granting that unlike me, He is almighty and immutable?

  Why is it that I am beset by these questions, by the need to define my set of beliefs, when everybody I know can be divided into two camps: my Filipino friends who are content to go regularly to Mass, say their Hail Marys, believe in the teachings of the Church, and then attend to their daily lives with a sense of peace and righteousness; and my European friends who, while nominally Christians, are satisfied to push their religious and spiritual inclinations aside, happy with living completely secular lives? To mask my discomfort, I do whatever they do whenever I can, and keep my mouth shut. Now, I want to tell on me as I really am.

  Growing up in a small town during the 1950s and 1960s, I came from a family with a father of uncertain faith and a mother who observed all the Roman Catholic rites, if only casually. As one could easily see, mine was not a very religious family. Among my early memories were about attending Mass on Sundays. To my young mind, Church was a cavernous structure, crowded and stiflingly hot, with the priest far away, resplendent in his colourful garments, muttering words I couldn’t understand. I would stand on the pew in my itchy Sunday best, trying not to make a sound lest I got the flesh-biting pinch from my mother. I would be waiting and waiting, it seemed forever, for the magical words, “Ite Missa Est”.

  Then, there were the processions during Holy Week. As one of the prominent families in our town, we contributed our Sta Veronica. This was a beautiful, larger-than-life-sized icon of the saint with delicate Nordic features, tears streaming down her cheeks as she held a kerchief with the imprint of the bloody face of Christ. She stood on a pedestal perched over an octagonal carosa (float), profusely decorated with artificial flowers, ablaze in lights powered by a portable generator. My extended family and I walked in procession beside our carosa. Here and there were capellas, each decorated with similar artificial flowers and smaller icons, and we genuflected each time we passed one. I mostly remember the hours of punishing summer heat mixed with noise and dust.

  During my First Confession at age seven, my mother wrote down my sins and had me practise reading them aloud so I could have something to tell the priest. Most of them were about being quarrelsome and disobedient, climbing trees and playing in the rain.

  When I was ten years old, I transferred from a government school in our town to a small Spanish convent school some thirty kilometres away. My two older sisters were already in Manila, being educated to be true colegialas (elite, convent-bread girls). However, my own stint in the Spanish colegio was not very successful as I fought with everyone, so the next year I was transferred again to another convent school, only recently established and ran by German Benedictine nuns. There I was to live for the next six years, and in the process, converted from a wild heathen into a pious, God-fearing, or more precisely, hell-fearing devotee.

  How this transformation happened was a model of missionary zeal. Some twenty-four of us who resided at school lived in the dormitory occupying the floor directly on top of the chapel. Although the wake-up bell rang only at six o’clock each morning, I could hear the faint chanting of the nuns as early as four-thirty. By six-forty-five, we would be joining them in saying the rosary. At around seven o’clock, the school pick-up would grind to a stop right by the chapel window to signal the arrival of the priest. Holy Mass would start immediately, with us girls seated in front and the nuns at the back. I, and probably the others as well, could sense their eyes directly on us, watching every move we made. For that reason, I would carefully fold my hands in prayer and sing the requisite hymns. Then, Communion time would come, and woe befell anyone who dared not receive Holy Communion. We would be subjected to an interrogation after Mass. Why was it that we didn’t receive Communion? Could it be that we hadn’t gone to Confession?

  I myself diligently went to Confession at least once a week—if not at school, then on Saturdays when I went home for the weekend. Unfortunately, I frequently committed a “mortal sin” before my next opportunity to confess.14—for example, an unbidden “bad” thought had entered my mind As if I wasn’t anxious enough thinking I could go to hell if I died in the state of sin, I had the added horror of knowing the grilling would come. Once or twice, I was tempted to simply go and receive Communion—the nuns would not have been any wiser. But God would have known, and that would have been yet another mortal sin. No, committing the sin of sacrilege was never an option. Far better to look down at your feet in shame.

  The alternative was hell! What stands out most of all in the memory of my adolescent years was how I developed a highly scrupulous conscience with an obsession to go to Confession because of my overwhelming fear of hell. This fear would make me sometimes break out in a cold sweat, one of the purgatories on earth that I endured.

  In a three-day closed retreat I attended when I was about thirteen, Father Hurley, a good-looking Irish priest, gave us a graphic rendition of hell that beat Dante Alighieri’s account of it. It was perhaps this constant fear of hell, even more than the desire to go to heaven, which turned me into a model Catholic. Thus, when the bishop decreed that whoever went to ballet school committed a mortal sin, I immediately stopped my dancing lessons. When he issued a warning against wearing trousers, I threw away all my fashionable toreadors. And when he said anyone attending the University of the Philippines—a haven for atheists and communists—would be excommunicated, I resisted my U.P. alumnus father’s suasions. Instead, I atte
nded university at another convent school— this time ran by American nuns.

  What did being a good Catholic mean then, as now? I remember the magical elements of Catholicism to which I fully subscribed: if you wore Our Lady’s scapular, the Blessed Virgin promises you would die in a state of grace; if you attended Mass for seven consecutive first Fridays, you would be assured of going to heaven. I also tried reciting novenas. There were special novenas to particular saints for all sorts of earthly maladies: to St Anthony if you lost something, to St. Joseph if you wanted a good husband, and to St Jude if you had a hopeless case. Pilgrimages were especially attractive because aside from gaining indulgences, you also had the fun of travelling. So, when I was seventeen, I persuaded my mother to allow me to join a group on a European tour, which included pilgrimages to Fatima and Lourdes. Whist in Lourdes, we dutifully submerged ourselves in the healing waters of its pools, and joined the other pilgrims in supplication at the grotto where our Lady appeared to St Bernadette.

  I cannot pinpoint the time when trust became less simple and I began questioning the rationality of my faith. I don’t know if it was my relocation to America or perhaps to Europe, which slowly changed my perspectives. I became less trusting.

  I read psychology at a non-sectarian university in New York City and became increasingly exposed to ideas of rationality. No, one was not supposed to accept things at face value. As a student of science, I was even supposed to question assumptions. Theories could be proven or disproven only through hard evidence. I became more concerned with hypotheses testing, the adequacy of my sampling techniques, and the rigour of my statistics. I remember an incident at the beginning of one semester when a classmate strayed into the wrong class. When he finally found us, our teacher exclaimed, “Oh, you went to room such-and-such. They are clinicians over there—artists.” The implication, of course, was that clinical psychologists were mere artists, but we behaviourists were scientists, i.e. we scientists were thumbing our noses at artists. As someone with a rather “artistic” bent, including a tendency to do messy research, I became more anxious to subscribe to the ethos of my group. From here, it was a small step to equating facts with truth. Thus, by the time I moved to Europe, I was open to European secularism.