FILIPINO WOMEN WRITERS IN ENGLISH AND THE WORK OF APPRENTICESHIP

Abstract

Among Filipino writers in English, women have had a central place in “training” writers, facilitating social networks, creating opportunities for print exposure, and producing writing themselves. As many critics of Anglophone Filipino writing have suggested, these writers' mastery of English and the short fiction form placed them in a privileged economic position. This article interrogates the relationship between Filipino women writers in English and the Filipino national body during the interwar period (1920–1946), asking after the kind of labor they contributed in the early decades of Filipino writing in English. Reading short fiction by Ligaya Victorio Fruto, a writer on the margin of the Philippine Anglophone canon, this essay proposes that the short story—in its form and practice—allowed women writers to depict the contradictions of national unity and class conflict, and modern and traditional Filipino femininity.