Today is Jose Rizal’s 157th birthday. He’s known for many things: a national hero, an admired novelist, and controversially, a playboy. It’s no secret that he’s dated several women—two of them he was engaged to—when he was still alive. This also became the butt of jokes, calling Rizal a “f*ckboy.”
But it begs the question: How did Rizal really view women? Was he a feminist or a misogynist?
To answer these, we did some digging from how he portrayed women in his works to his personal relationships. Here’s what we found out:
Jose Rizal has strong female role models
Rizal grew up in a dominantly female household. His mother Teodora Alonso taught him at a young age and was the one who “opened his eyes and heart to the world around him—with all its soul and poetry, as well as its bigotry and injustice.” She also imbibed onto him the virtue of obedience, self-reliance, and to value education above all. But they did have a bit of a falling out when Rizal chose to become distant to the Catholic faith due to the corruption happening within the church at the time.
Nonetheless, Rizal seemed to have carried the lessons his mother taught him throughout his life. He even shared his insight on education to his sister Trinidad and how she deserved to have that privilege as a woman living in the Philippines.
“For this reason, now that you are still young and you have time to learn, it is necessary that you study by reading and reading attentively. It is a pity that you allow yourself to be dominated by laziness when it takes so little effort to shake it off. It is enough to form only the habit of study and later everything goes by itself,” he wrote in a letter from Heidelberg, Germany.
Women and education
Picking up from the last point, Rizal’s letter to Trinidad showed his realization of how different it would be if women, like his other sister María, would be educated in a liberal country like Germany.
“If our sister María had been educated in Germany, she would have been notable, because German women are active and somewhat masculine. They are not afraid of men. They are more concerned with the substance than with appearances. Until now I have not heard women quarreling, which in Madrid is the daily bread.”
The statement may also give off a sense that he’s degrading of how Filipinas are living at the time; that he places German (maybe even European as a whole) womanhood on a pedestal. But given the historical context of the Philippines during Spanish rule, where Filipinos in general have been influenced and became subversive to their colonizers, was his thought process valid? Was he making a fair comparison and emphasizing that Filipinas should stop being meek and unaware? And more importantly, was he also taking into consideration the Filipinas who are in the lower class?
Challenged colonial and patriarchal mentality
The Philippines was believed to be an egalitarian society, with women being revered and seen as equal to men, before the Spanish arrived in the country. According to a research paper by Juliet de Lima, the oppression of women was a product of colonization, which ingrained the idea that women are to stay in the household and made to reproduce.
In “Jose Rizal and the ‘Woman Question'” by E. San Juan, Jr., it’s said that Rizal was “compelled to wrestle with the challenge of discovering ways of altering [women’s] subaltern marginalization and subordination” via his works.
“He tried to usher his sisters and other female compatriots into the political/public sphere (for example, schooling, shared conversations in civic gatherings, and other modes of communal praxis) to thwart the oppressive privatization of their bodies and psyches,” San Juan wrote.
Hence, his fictional female characters like Maria Clara and Sisa can be seen as representative of how colonialism and patriarchy destroyed the roles of women. There are also interpretations that Maria Clara symbolizes the Philippines’ unhappy state under Spanish rule since she is Filipino-Spanishj. (Spoiler for those who didn’t pay attention to “Noli Me Tangere” in high school.)
Possibly predicting the need for the Reproductive Health Law
In 2011, Rizal became a key figure and role model amid the passing of the Reproductive Health (RH) Law. San Juan noted that Rizal’s works “shows how patriarchal supremacy founded on the control of women’s bodies and their productivity becomes the ultimate ‘weak link’ in the colonial class/race hierarchy.” Akbayan Party-List noted before that the arguments against the RH Law were similar to how the Church opposed the Rizal Law, saying that it “violated the ‘freedom of conscience and religion’ of Filipino Catholics.”
As we know, the RH Law is important for women as it focuses on our health and gives control to our bodies. It’s a reach to say that Rizal was an important catalyst to its implementation, but we have to hand it to him for saying that women should have full control of their bodies.
Jose Rizal and his relationships
You might be wondering how Rizal’s relationships went in the 35 years he was alive. Most of the women he had relations with were from his travels—there’s literally one woman per country like in Germany and Japan. This is obviously where most of his “playboy adventures” began.
The common denominator for Rizal’s relationships abroad is that it didn’t last long. It ended as soon as he had to leave the country. Plus, he didn’t father any children from these women except for Josephine Bracken, who unfortunately had a miscarriage because Rizal pulled a prank on her while in Dapitan.
What does this tell us? One interpretation is that Rizal loves women and would almost always flirt with the ones he found attractive and caring. But he didn’t maintain long-term relationships, especially after the death of his first fiancée and cousin Leonor Rivera. His first long-term relation was Josephine but their partnership was cut short when Rizal was executed.
Art by Marian Hukom
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