The Story of Work and Women 

Marianita Villariba 

In her keynote speech to the workshop, Marianita Villariba took us back into her country's history to see how breastfeeding, an unquestioned part of women's ancestral role, became "a subversive activity" after the invasion of the Spanish conquistadors.  Drawing a parallel with the lives of slave women in the Caribbean, she hypothesized that the traditions of strong women leaders from pre-colonial times were carried on by women using their wisdom about women's reproduction to resist the cultural changes brought by the introduction of Catholicism and Spanish domination.  Thus, she gives breastfeeding a place among feminist concerns as a way for women to assert or reclaim autonomy over their bodies. 

Women's work, which is at the heart of the feminist struggle, has made possible the great accumulations of wealth under capitalism and socialism. Under colonialism, the indigenous woman was valued for her productive work, not for her work as a mother. 

In our own time, under a new feminist concept of labor, the model worker is a mother, and her primary work is the production and preservation of life.  In a world arranged along feminist lines, concepts of time would reflect the needs of the mother-worker, and space would be organized in a way to allow her to nurture her children as well as doing other productive work. 

A feminist definition of work acknowledges that the work mothers do is essential.  This acknowledgement would provide a way to value women's s real production and maintenance of human beings and the things that enhance human life, in contrast to the things of no intrinsic worth, for instance financial speculation and global spending on militarism, that are valued by the current economic system. 

To close, Villariba reminded the workshop of the many ways that breastfeeding empowers women.  Breastfeeding decreases women's dependence on consumer goods in the marketplace, and on a medicalized interpretation of women's reproductive capacity.  Breastfeeding benefits women's health directly and contributes to healthy child-spacing.  Breastfeeding builds women's self-reliance and validates women's traditional knowledge.  Breastfeeding encourages cooperation among women and between women and men in the care of mothers and children.  Breastfeeding calls for women's reproductive work to be acknowledged.  Breastfeeding challenges the notion that women's breasts are merely sex objects.  All in all, the structural changes in society that enhance and support breastfeeding create conditions that improve women's lives. 
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In the Philippines, the legal framework of the Convention for the Rights of the Child (CRC), is the basis for a social movement, the Child-Friendly Movement (CFM).  A definition of "child-friendly" is based on the awareness that the family is the enabling environment for the child and, in a child-friendly environment, the family has the capacity to care for the child.