Proceedings of the 10th International Academic Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Creating Spaces for the Filipina: Teodoro A. Agoncillo’s Contribution to Women’s Historiography
Charita A. Delos Reyes
ABSTRACT:
History textbooks mirror society, but the author, the text, the readers, and the ideology embodied in its publication are mediated by political events, personal circumstances, institutions, and dominant perspectives. History textbooks reflect the gender bias that engulfs society. Nationalist history became a contested domain for its celebration of men’s achievements and masculinist mythologies. It has often been blamed for rendering women invisible. Mainstream curriculum, including history textbooks, is male-centric. However, the challenges to academic history in the 1960s and ‘70s, with the stirrings of the women’s (feminist) movements, could have brought many improvements in women’s visibility in historical writing and nationalist narratives. Textual analysis and content analysis were used to examine Teodoro A. Agoncillo’s History of the Filipino People, 8th edition. Q.C.: Garotech Publishing, 1990, to determine how this classical work in Philippine History, a textbook and common reading in schools and universities until today, could have possibly documented the Filipina’s contribution to the national story. Cognizant of the controversies in the publication history of the book and with the proviso that this research undertaking will not enrage some male custodians of Philippine national history, this study used the following categories to analyze the HFP, namely: listings of women in the Table of Contents, listings of women in the Index, number of women in the book, women representations in the text: “articulates” and “inarticulates,” roles portrayed by women, the choice and number of illustrations on women, language use in the book, acknowledgment of women’s contributions, and sources cited on women.
keywords: historiography, history textbook, national history, women’s history