A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

The second house I lived in in Capiz was smaller than the first, and had on the lower floor a Filipino family in one room. I demanded that they be ejected if I rented the house, but the owner begged me to reconsider. They were, she said, old-time servants of hers to whom she felt it her duty to give shelter. They had always looked after her house and would look after me.

I yielded to her insistence, but doubtingly. In six weeks I was perfectly convinced of her wisdom and my foolishness. Did it rain, Basilio came flying up to see if the roof leaked. If a window stuck and would not slide, I called Basilio. For the modest reward of two pesos a month (one dollar gold) he skated my floors till they shone like mirrors. He ran errands for a penny or two. His wife would embroider for me, or wash a garment if I needed it in a hurry. If I had an errand which took me out nights, Basilio lit up an old lantern, unsolicited, and went ahead with the light and a bolo. If a heavy rain came up when I was at school, he appeared with my mackintosh and rubbers. And while a great many small coins went from me to him, I could never see that the pay was proportional to his care. Yet there was no difficulty in comprehending it. Pilar (my landlady) had told him to take care of me, and he was obeying orders. If she had told him to come up and bolo me as I slept, he would have done it unhesitatingly.

The result of American occupation has been a rise in the price of agricultural labor, and in the city of Manila in all labor. But in the provinces the needle-woman, the weaver, and the house servant work still for inconceivably small prices, while there has been a decided rise in the price of local manufactures. Jusi, which cost three dollars gold a pattern in 1901, now costs six and nine dollars. Exquisite embroideries on piña, which is thinner than bolting cloth, have quadrupled their prices, but the provincial women servants, who weave the jusi and do the embroidering, still work for a few cents a day and two scanty meals.

When I arrived here a seamstress worked nine hours a day for twenty cents gold and her dinner. Now in Manila a seamstress working for Americans receives fifty cents gold and sometimes seventy-five cents and her dinner, though the Spanish, Filipinos, and Chinese pay less. In the province of Capiz twelve and a half cents gold per day for a seamstress is the recognized price for an American to pay—natives get one for less. A provincial Filipino pays his coachman two and a half dollars gold a month, and a cook one dollar and a half. An American for the same labor must pay from four to eight dollars for the cook and three to six dollars for the coachman. As before stated, the subordinate servants in a Filipino house cost next to nothing, because of the utilization of child labor.

A provincial Filipino can support quite an establishment, and keep a carriage on an income of forty dollars gold a month where to an American it would cost sixty or eighty dollars. This is due partly to our own consumption of high-priced tinned foods, partly to the better price paid for labor, but chiefly to our desire to feed our servants into good healthy condition. We not only see that they have more food, but we look more closely to its variety and nutritious qualities. We employ adults and demand more labor, because our housekeeping is more complex than Filipino housekeeping, and we expect to employ fewer servants than Filipinos do.

The Filipinos, the Spanish, and even the English who are settled here cling to mediæval European ideas in the matter of service. If they have any snobbish weakness for display, it is in the number of retainers they can muster. Just as in our country rural prosperity is evinced by the upkeep of fences and buildings, the spic and span new paint, and the garish furnishings, here it is written in the number of servants and hangers-on. The great foreign trading firms like to boast of the tremendous length of their pay rolls. They would rather employ four hundred underworked mediocrities at twenty pesos a month than half a hundred abilities at four times that amount. The land-holders like to think of the mouths they are responsible for feeding so very poorly, and the busy housewife jingles her keys from weaving-room to embroidery frame, from the little tienda on the ground floor, where she sells vino, cigars, and betel-nut, to the extemporized bakery in the kitchen, where they are making rice cakes and taffy candy, which an old woman will presently hawk about the streets for her.

One of the curious things here is the multiplicity of resource which the rich classes possess. A rich land-holder will have his rice fields, sugar mill, vino factory, and cocoanut and hemp plantations. He will own a fish corral or two, and be one of the backers of a deep-sea fishing outfit. He speculates a little in rice, and he may have some interest in pearl fisheries. On a bit of land not good for much else he has the palm tree, which yields buri for making mats and sugar bags. His wife has a little shop, keeps several weavers at work, and an embroidery woman or two. If she goes on a visit to Manila, the day after her return her servants are abroad, hawking novelties in the way of fans, knick-knacks, bits of lace, combs, and other things which she has picked up to earn an honest penny. If a steamer drops in with a cargo of Batangas oranges, she invests twenty or thirty pesos, and has her servants about carrying the trays of fruit for sale. According to her lights, which are not hygienic, she is a good housekeeper and a genuine helpmeet. She keeps every ounce of food under lock and key, and measures each crumb that is used in cooking. She keeps the housekeeping accounts, handles the money, never pries into her husband’s affairs, bears him a child every year, and is content, in return for all this devotion, with an ample supply of pretty clothes and her jewels. She herself does not work, busy as she is, and it speaks well for the faith and honor of the Filipino people that she can secure labor in plenty to do all these things for her, to handle moneys and give a faithful account of them. It is pitiful to see how little the Filipino laboring class can do for itself, how dependent it is upon the head of its superiors, and how content it is to go on piling up wealth for them on a mere starvation dole.

As before said, the laboring man who attaches himself to a great family does so because it gives him security. He is nearly always in debt to it, but if he is sick and unable to work he knows his rice will come in just the same. Under the old Spanish system, a servant in debt could not quit his employer’s service till the debt was paid. The object of an employer was to get a man in debt and keep him so, in which case he was actually, although not nominally, a slave. While this law is no longer in force, probably not ten per cent of the laboring population realize it. They know that an American cannot hold them in his employ against their will, but they do not know that this is true of Filipinos and Spaniards. Nor is the upper class anxious to have them informed. The poor frequently offer their children or their younger brothers and sisters to work out their debts.

Children are sold here also. Twice in my first year at Capiz, I refused to buy small children who were offered for sale by their parents lest the worse evil of starvation should befall them; and once, on my going into a friend’s house, she showed me a child of three or four years that she had bought for five pesos. She remarked that it was a pity to let the child starve, and that in a year or two its labor would more than pay for its keep.

Filipinos who have capital enough all keep one or more pigs. These are yard scavengers, and, as sanitary measures are little observed by this race, have access to filth that makes the thought of eating their flesh exceedingly repulsive. When the owners are ready to kill, however, the pig is brought upstairs into the kitchen, where it lives luxuriously on boiled rice, is bathed once a day, and prepared for slaughter like a sacrificial victim. If you are personally acquainted with a pig of this sort and know the day set for his decease, you may send your servant out to buy fresh pork; otherwise you had better stick to chicken and fish.