Amazing women I knew from books

THE pandemic lockdowns bought for me a new way of acquiring books, especially those already out of print, from Facebook sellers. Tomorrow will be the 126th anniversary of the Proclamation of Philippine Independence, but our standard histories admittedly can give us a very limited list of people who contributed to our nationhood, especially women. Here are some amazing women, unfamiliar to many in the present, who we can learn about from the books I bought recently:

From historian Virginia Benitez Licuanan comes a biography and a collection of texts and letters by her mom, Paz Marquez Benitez: "One Woman's Life, Letters and Writings." She was the Manila Carnival Queen of 1912, who eventually became a professor at the UP Department of English and one of the seven founders of the Philippine Women's University. She married Francisco Benitez, after whom the UP College of Education building was named for being its founder and first dean, and together they created the influential Philippine Educational Magazine. But her primary role in the struggle for freedom was to write the short story "Dead Stars" in 1925, which influenced a new generation of writers and is considered critical of the American occupiers at the height of their powers, regarding them as detrimental to and causing the deterioration of our heritage. If that is not amazing enough, she ran a printing press, ran a mango and poultry farm, was captain of the first Philippine girls' basketball team in 1912, and is believed to be the first Filipino woman to drive a car.