5 must-read books for Women's Month

As we celebrate Women's Month and the achievements of women over the years, we must also look at the fight it took for women to get this far—the struggles, losses, and challenges that women of all ages, here and abroad, had to overcome—to truly understand the complexities of the female experience.

Here is a small selection of books published by the Ateneo University Press to encourage us to think critically about women's rights and gender equality, and better celebrate women's achievements.

1. College Boy by Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta

Girls in books have entire lives ahead of them.

As girls, they’re at their brightest.

Wifehood’s the endgame for those with no imagination.

College Boy examines the small assaults and transgressions that take place in the plain settings of the playground, the parking lot, the workplace, the route home. In a book review, the collection is described as “the rawest hurt of a woman struggling to grow into her own shape in a world where the battleground of sexual politics has been terraformed for men for millennia.” The poet discovers how these personal acts are nourished by a dark constellation of learned tendency and behavior that are at the root of toxic masculinity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta is the author of four poetry collections: The Proxy Eros, Burning Houses, Hush Harbor, and Eros Redux. She obtained an MFA from the New School University in 2004 and has since taught in major universities in Manila. Katigbak-Lacuesta has also coedited various literary Filipino poetry anthologies for Cordite Poetry Review and Vagabond Press. In 2019, she co-edited The Achieve of, The Mastery: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English, the mid-’90s to 2016 with Dr. Gemino Abad.

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2. Ascending the Fourth Mountain: A Personal Account of the Marcos Years by Maria Virginia Yap Morales

Some of the most powerful voices in a woman’s life are those of other women, mothers, and titas (aunts, but also older women relatives, or close friends of the clan). Our male relatives were mostly out of the house in comparison to our aunts, so it is them who ask you, “Kumain ka na?” Some of them feed on your fears to keep you in line; our yayas told us about the aswang (blood suckers and ghosts) to scare us into closing our eyes and going to sleep. But the women in the family are usually our steady support. 

In Ascending the Fourth Mountain, Maria Virginia Yap Morales tells her story of the martial law years and of the widespread participation of women against violations of human rights and sexual abuse under military detention. This book is the story of a woman who struggled for equality within a revolutionary movement and fully participated to draft the orientation of the Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan. More than that, this book is the author’s inner journey to discover and study herself and to eventually see through the mote in her own eye that blurs a fourth mountain looming large, blocking her vision of political and social transformation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Virginia Yap Morales writes primarily about Philippine political and social history. With this book Ascending the Fourth Mountain, she completes a trilogy of the Filipino story from the vantage point of her birthplace which is the little-written-about southern island of Mindanao. She is the author of Balay Ukit: Tropical Architecture in Pre-WWII Filipino Houses which won a national book award in 2014. She is also the author of Diary of the War: WW II Memoirs of Lt. Col. Anastacio Campo (Ateneo University Press, 2006), a biography of her grandfather, an officer stationed in the southern city at the outbreak of World War II, and the war that unfolded in the backyards and farms of Davao City. She said of her poems A Time to Live and a Time to Write: “When I feel that I have so much to say I write, and while writing I understand better why I feel like so.”

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3. Broken Islands by Criselda Yabes

She has changed, I’m certain of that. While around her the island she had left seemed the same. She came back. This is home to her. This is the story that made her put up all her charcoal-painted portraits in the town hall, depicting her metamorphosis. This was the moment she’d been waiting for.

Set in the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda, Broken Islands is about two women—Luna and Alba—whose lives become entangled through their occupation of a house and their relationships with each other and with the Cimafranca paterfamilias Manoy, who is uncle to one and amo to the other.

In this beautifully written and realized novel, the characters are as vividly rendered as the Borbon (Cebu ca. 2015) they inhabit, and as complex. The novel, particularly the sections on Typhoon Yolanda and the bungled rescue and reconstruction efforts in its wake, is notable for marrying literary sensibility and expression with journalism's fidelity to facts and on-the-ground observation. Exploring issues of class and gender hierarchy and inequality, the novel refuses easy (re)solutions, offering instead a subtle, dark-tinged vision of our broken islands.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Criselda Yabes has published eight books, including Broken Islands. It follows Below the Crying Mountain, which won the UP Centennial Literary award in 2008 and was nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010. A journalism graduate of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, she worked as a correspondent for the international press in Manila, covering politics and coups as well as other major events overseas.

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4. The RH Bill Story: Contentions and Compromises by Marilen J. Dañguilan 

The law has done very little except to perpetuate the myth that women are helpless and therefore should be put on a pedestal. The fact is, the pedestal is a cage, constricted by social systems and hemmed in by archaic and anti-feminist laws.

The quote above is by Felicitas Aquino during the September 12, 1986 deliberation with Cecilia Muños-Palma, then President of the Constitutional Commission. 

In this book, Marilen Dañguilan tells the fascinating account of the long and stormy process behind the ultimate enactment of the RH Law. Dañguilan traces the RH law’s legislative history, and deftly weaves into her narrative the various factors and groups that framed, informed, and influenced the debates around one of the most divisive laws in recent history.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marilen Dañguilan is a medical doctor trained in policymaking and has worked in UNICEF as senior adviser on Maternal health and in the Philippine Senate as head of the Technical Staff for the Committee on Health. She is the author of Making Choices in Good Faith: A Challenge to the Catholic Church’s Teachings on Sexuality and Contraception, which won the National Book Award in 1993, and Women in Brackets: A Chronicle of Vatican Power and Control, which was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 1997.

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5. Woman Enough and Other Essays by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil

But it is possible to say that the Filipino woman, in general, is aggressive, vigorous, and madly ambitious. There is almost no limit to her intelligence or her capabilities. She will rise to every challenge, time after time, tirelessly and magnificently. She will take the world on her shoulders, even when she does not have to. 

Women Enough and Other Essays is composed of 22 journalistic essays by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil culled from her daily columns on politics and general interest written between 1951 and 1961. The essays were written during the hot and heady years of post-World-War-II journalism in Manila. Still reeling from the mute despair of the war, writers from everywhere were fiendishly exuberant, articulate, and hard-as-nails.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carmen Guerrero Nakpil has been writing professionally since 1946. More than ten thousand articles, essays, editorial-page columns, short stories, and lectures have been published in dailies, weeklies, and quarterlies. Some of them have been reprinted, syndicated, or translated for anthologies, textbooks, and collections.

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