Overview

In Filipino culture, motherhood is a defining aspect of womanhood. From a young age, women are encouraged to marry and have children. Training for child rearing begins during childhood with sisters taking care of their younger siblings. Girls are expected to be knowledgeable in all aspects of domestic life and create a stable, respectable household. Mothers, regardless of their influence over their children, are simultaneously held in high esteem while subject to constant scrutiny by society. The family is the mother’s burden. Catholic society propagates that a woman cannot be happy nor complete personally or religiously until she has children. To the Church, maternal instincts are a given without bearing any mind to a woman’s bodily autonomy. In literature, now more than ever, women are expressing their thoughts about motherhood: responsibilities, love, guilt, sexual freedom, and sacrifice. The following texts elaborate on these themes, providing us with a view of the modern mother.

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Supplementary Source:

Mothering and Motherhood: Experience, Ideology, and Agency