Do you have a privilege card, ma'am?

Women’s rights have come a long way from its beginnings and struggles at the start of the 19th century. Yet a large population of women is still struggling for their rights and privileges. While those who have come to their own rights and privileges through the efforts and sacrifices of the pioneers do not appreciate and can not seem to understand what they have.

I know of librarians who do not attend council meetings because they think they do not get anything from these meetings. They call these meetings a waste of time and financial resources. They do not know or choose to forget perhaps that had it not been for these seemingly wasteful meetings, librarians nowadays would not have enjoyed the privileges of being a “professional librarian”. Someone even went so far as to say she won’t attend meetings anymore because she is no longer an officer.

Far worse than these kinds of librarians is the librarian who thinks her co-librarian is wasting company time and resources when and if that fellow librarian is performing council officer’s tasks, duties and responsibilities during work hour.

I ask then, when is the proper time to be president, secretary, treasurer or even a mere member of one’s council? After 5 p.m. and before 8 a.m., when offices are closed for the evening? Had the librarians’ early movements been successful because their supervisors and employers forbid them to use typewriters, telephones, fax machines, etc. during office hours?

Maybe I am just an ignorant fool who does not know the ways of the world. Maybe PLAI is what it is today because the pioneer Filipino librarians did what had to be done for the profession and the association after 5 p.m. only; diligently, conscientiously never using company time and resources for personal gain such as pushing for the professionalization of librarianship, and working for the establishment of the PLAI and its regional councils.

The fight for our rights does not end. We have to be always vigilant because there are those who wish to bring us down and sometimes they are our own kind.

Now for the money

A room of one's own is a book by Virginia Woolf. This is one of my favorite books. It is doubly treasured because it is the only book I have that has a dedication—from my brother. It can be downloaded subject to copyright; you might like to read the whole book.

The book is basically about: "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." But it could be about women who love to dance, paint or cook, become a lawyer, doctor or first-class pilot. Women nowadays are better educated and have more options in life than in her time, but there are still girls left behind. As with any era, it is the women from wealthy families that are able to explore themselves for talents and abilities and are able realize their full potentials if they choose to do so.

The poor girl who is able to enroll in college could have excelled in academics but we’ll never know because she has to work for her living too. She maybe able to earn a degree but she has deferred other dreams for herself because she had to support her younger siblings through school if not become the breadwinner for the whole family. Or she herself has become a mother and if she is the kind of mother Virginia Woolf talked of: “What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses?", then the cycle of women poverty will continue. The glimmer of talents she may have could never be developed because she does not have the time or the money to enroll in extra classes and extensive trainings: ""then the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide—a small one but dear to the possessor—perishing and with it my self, my soul,—all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart." Most of them do not even have a space of their own to relax, think, or just be; they have to share rooms with other women in cramp lodgings.

But for the exceptionally talented, she does not have a hope because our nepotistic system forbids her to. Sometimes even outstanding talent does not bring her anywhere without endorsements.

Saddest of all reasons why some women do not realize their potentials is not the patriarchal society that some of them still has to live in, but that some women just absolutely detest other women and will do anything in their power to put down possible contenders: "To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks."