In this essay, I reflect on the contradictions that arise from a personal experience of conflict with my father and the clash of traditional Filipino gender norms in the context of the practice of name changes within the institution of marriage and intersecting feminist critiques of patriarchy. My understanding of the Tagalog amor propio is self-love or self-pride within Filipino culture and signifies one's authority, place, and meaning in the community. As a concept of authority, amor propio encourages practices of respect toward the authority figure. In the context of the home, amor propio is attributed to the father, and members of the family ought to respect his amor propio. This essay examines my own conflicted relationship with my father and my attempts to navigate the complex terrain of amor propio, as a Filipina, feminist/peminist,Footnote ¹ dutiful daughter. Filipino immigrant families face distinct challenges within family life owing to globalization, colonialism, and racism, so I find Jane Addams's social ethics of filial relations helpful in framing the tension between individual and social claims within the specific cultural values expected of Filipina women as dutiful daughters. Addams's feminist social sensibilities in her work at Hull House were attuned to the plight of daughters and the conflicting claims of the family emergent within the crowded immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago. She was able to articulate and sympathetically understand the generational divide within immigrant families at Hull House and sought to bridge these differences within the context of the family. I reflect on her work in my own experience as a dutiful Filipina daughter.

What does a Filipina feminist look like? As a 1.5-generation Filipina immigrant—I was born in the Philippines and immigrated to America when I was a year old—to the US, growing up in a family as the middle child, the only girl among four brothers, I never really had to answer this question until I was thirty-seven years old and pregnant with my daughter, when my father disowned me because the name I chose upon my marriage was the product of my feminist convictions. This was quite shocking for me since my own relationship to feminism emerged when I was a college student in my twenties taking women's studies courses, and then in my late twenties becoming fully immersed in the academic literature and intellectual activism of women's studies as a graduate student. Though I had my own ambivalence about feminism in graduate school, I not only graduated with a women's and gender studies graduate certificate, but my dissertation itself engaged with feminist philosophy. I mention my academic lineage to feminism because my dear father was present at all my graduation ceremonies, knew full well of my commitment to feminist thought, and applauded my first academic appointment at Towson University in which I held a joint appointment in the Departments of Women's Studies and Philosophy. Some women, especially Filipinas, would have to hide their commitment to feminism (a controversial word/concept in conservative Filipino immigrant homes), but in my case, I felt no need to hide my feminism. If anyone would know what a Filipina feminist would look like, it would be my dear father. However, the question “what does a Filipina feminist look like” radically shifted in meaning for me at the moment my father disowned me.

It all started with a late-night call from my brother, who was living with my parents at the time. He was calling me from his car outside their house. He said that our parents had been fighting for a long time and it had escalated to the point where he had to leave the house, get in his car, and call me. The fight, it turned out, was about me. At a recent family gathering (that I did not attend because I was working on the east coast), my Filipina mother, as with all Filipina mothers, showcased to my family one of my early publications in the anthology Philosophy and Jimmy Buffett, edited by Scott Pratt and Erin McKenna (Bardwell-Jones Reference Bardwell-Jones, McKenna and Pratt2009). I had received about ten copies of this anthology from the publisher, so I naturally sent one copy to my parents. Of course, the byline of the chapter I wrote for the anthology was printed as: Celia T. Bardwell-Jones. Bardwell-Jones is my married name, and none of the elements of this name are mine. I married a third-generation Bardwell-Jones. The “T” in my middle name represents my mother's maiden name, Tagamolila. I'll get into why I name myself this way later. However, during the party, it was pointed out to my father that “M,” representing my maiden name, Manglicmot, was not present in my byline any longer. It appeared that I had dropped Manglicmot (which I did) and hence had ignored my father's contribution to my upbringing (which I did not).

Now, I understood the playful banter from my aunts as just trying to lovingly tease my father about losing a child because she grew up; but I am no longer my father's baby girl. This publication really pointed this fact out, and my dear father took this playful banter as an affront to his role, his duty as the patriarch of the Manglicmot family. His amor propio was challenged. I can empathize with his response because he was an immigrant to the US, and few of his family members had also made it to the US. He had an estranged brother who lived in San Diego, and his sisters had all lived in the Philippines before recently passing away. However, regardless of his own personal relationship to his family, he nonetheless saw that his role is to be the father, the patriarch of one of the last Manglicmot families in the US, to ensure that his lineage continues through me despite the fact that I had four brothers. Given the patriarchal structure embedded in the nuclear family traditions around my immigrant community in Los Angeles, there would be nothing to worry about in the continuation of the Manglicmot family name. I had four brothers. Manglicmots will live on in abundance! My transgression, however, had nothing to do with the continuation of the family name. This was an offense based on Filipino culture and the role of the father within the Filipino family; I no longer had the family brand burned on my identity. Yes, I was no longer his baby girl, but more important, I was also no longer his family possession.

Of course, as I researched about family and kinship structures in the Philippines by interviewing various relatives, I found that the Philippines has a bilateral kinship structure, in which the mother's and the father's lineages are considered equal. It is not unusual for a mother's maiden name to be passed down to the child as their middle name. This actually occurred with me. Tagamolila represents my mother's maiden name. Though actual authority within Filipino homes rests mostly with the mother and extended family, the father is considered the head of the household: breadwinner, political representative of the family, and disciplinarian of the children.

Being an idealistic feminist in my early twenties, when I married my partner, we decided to create our own family naming tradition. We both wanted to have all of us, including our future children, to have the same names. Since my partner's name was already hyphenated, it would be absurd to add a triple hyphenated last name. Hence, we decided to trade names, and he changed his middle name to Tagamolila and I changed my last name to Bardwell-Jones. All of our children's middle names and surnames are Tagamolila Bardwell-Jones. We explained our utopian/hippie naming tradition to our parents at our wedding, which my dad did attend; he did not register a complaint. So when I was pregnant with my daughter and found out that my betrayal (that had happened fifteen years earlier) only now became classified as a betrayal, it brought a shift in the family. My seven-year-old niece knew full well that she shouldn't drop the Manglicmot name, my sisters-in-law vowed they would never change their names, and my mother defiantly told my father to shut the fuck up. My aunt who brought this issue up tried to reconcile the situation during my baby shower (that my father DID NOT attend) by giving a shirt to the new baby with the line: Baby Tagamolila Manglicmot Bardwell-Jones. And I think she gave shirts to all my kids so that they could wear their heritage proudly. My Father's Day card was returned in the mail, and I heard through my mother that my father had officially disowned me. What does a Filipina feminist look like turned out to be a radically different question for me.

I recently learned the concept of amor propio at the First International Multidisciplinary Filipino Studies Conference held at the University of Hawai`i, Hilo in 2017. At a panel on the mind of the Filipino student in the Philippines, the presenter characterized the avoidance behavior of Filipino students when questioned by the teacher.Footnote ² Students would tend not to answer the question directly; because of amor propio, they would sidestep or indirectly respond to the question. Amor propio refers to a type of shame the student would display in the presence of an authority figure, such as a teacher. Hence, the shame displayed signified a type of humility and respect for the teacher. Another way of understanding amor propio in my father's context reflects the definition of amor propio as self-esteem, self-pride. In this case, my dropping his name symbolically undermined my father's self-pride. I rejected his lineage. On another account, I, as his favorite child, disavowed his love and in a sense undermined his self-pride. Culturally, this is significant within the Ilocano heritage, as amor propio is the basis of one's integrity in the community. It turns out that, unlike the student who evades questions posed by the teacher, my name-changing act purportedly undermined my father's integrity and place in the community. I directly and openly challenged my father's amor propio.

The politics of naming within the second-wave feminist movement echoes the politics of the institution of marriage. Scholars have argued that marriage created a legitimized institution of patriarchy and the subordination of women (Geller Reference Geller2001). Marriage regulated women's sexuality because of heredity. Marriage was a form of ownership. Wives could not speak for themselves in a court of law. In eighteenth-century England, wives were incorporated into the husband's identity. Marriage is the backdrop for many of the problems that the second-wave feminist movement sought to address. Hence, alternative practices of naming emerged upon marriage. Women can keep their names, they can hyphenate their names, they can keep their surname as their middle name, and they can create a new name and combine names with their spouse's. The feminist movement brought about options for women, including for me as a 1.5 Filipina American immigrant. However, a radical refusal, an oppositional stance to a clear instance of irrational patriarchy within my family, within my own Filipino culture, did not seem to be the appropriate response to this all-too-personal situation. What does a Filipina feminist look like when, on the one hand, rebellion, protest, and opposition may seem to be the right path of justice in battling patriarchy within the family but could lead to ending a relationship with the irrational patriarch: the ultimate desertion. On the other hand, the Filipina daughter in me quiets my feminist moral outrage and prompts me to reconsider irrationally disowning my father as he disowned me as his daughter. This hesitation, this ambivalence, this moment of silence had shifted the question of “What does a Filipina feminist look like?” within the moral landscape of the duties of a Filipina daughter.

Addams's work in social ethics speaks specifically to my own experience, as she examines the complicated ethical terrain of filial relation: “the relation of the parents and their grown-up daughters” (Addams Reference Addams2002, 36). Unlike the specific tension related to the filial relations Addams discusses, where the family is unsettled about their daughter seeking a career rather than establishing a family, my family, particularly my father, encouraged me to seek a college education and anticipated that I would do so. Filipinas, in my family, were expected to find careers outside the home. However, despite this “freedom” to seek a career, I was expected to prioritize family claims and, similar to the daughter expected to stay at home, any “attempt to break away must therefore be willful and self-indulgent” (36). In my case, my father's concern wasn't that my career would break me away from filial obligations to him, but that my aunt's teasing awakened his amor propio such that the choice of my name became interpreted as a symbolic attempt to abandon my family, particularly my father. I became interpreted as “willful and self-indulgent.” I appreciate Addams's description of a daughter's commitment to the family as an “elemental claim,” impossible to abandon. Moreover, a social claim needs to be reconciled between the family and the daughter, such that a daughter's interest outside of the family claim is integrated or “adjusted” into a social relation. The struggle, Addams argues, is “tragic,” as the “destruction of either of which would bring ruin to the ethical life” (37). So, what is her solution to this ethical dilemma?

Addams carefully unpacks the limitations of perspectives of both the father and the daughter. She points out that the failure of father and daughter rests upon the inability of each of them to escape a narrow conception of family obligation. From the perspective of the father, it is essential that parents engage and broaden their world-views, to learn more about the social interests of their daughter. She suggests that in sharing pursuits with one's children, parents are in a better position to understand the social obligation. The tragedy of King Lear was that “his own emotions are dearer to him than his sense of parental obligation” (45). In my own reflection on my father, amor propio became a barrier that prevented him from understanding his social obligation as a parent.

From the perspective of the daughter, it is essential that daughters who seek meaning in their life outside of the family must not become narrow in their conception of their obligations to the family, especially when the family delimits her autonomy and decision-making capacities. The tragedy of Cordelia was that her “self-absorption” led to her desertion of the family. In response to my own tragic situation, I certainly did not want to adopt this Cordelian model of daughterhood, though I am certainly sympathetic to it. And so, what would the social adjustment look like for me? And would it be feminist?

Against the backdrop of colonialism, racism, and immigration, Filipina daughters experience the filial relation different from that in a traditional American family. In a chapter of her book Home Bound, titled “We Don't Sleep Around Like White Girls Do,” Yen Li Espiritu studied how gender becomes an important vehicle for racialized immigrants to assert moral superiority over the dominant white culture (Espiritu Reference Espiritu2003). In this case, American white women were considered loose, sexually deviant, and morally inferior. This critique of American women's sexuality offers a stance of resistance against assimilation into a racist Anglo culture. However, this stance relies on perpetuating Filipino women's subordination. According to Espiritu, “The elevation of Filipina chastity (the role of the Filipina daughter) has the effect of reinforcing masculinist and patriarchal power in the name of a greater ideal of national and ethnic self-respect” (Espiritu Reference Espiritu2003, 158). Hence many young Filipinas face restrictions within their own family in the areas of “autonomy, mobility and personal decision-making” (158). In this sense, the “freer” you appeared to be, the more Americanized you have become and the more transgressive you are to the standards of the ideal Filipina daughter, which include chastity and subordination.

Filipinas balance the dutiful role of caring for the family and their parents as well as acknowledging the limitations of that care that restricts their autonomy. The boundedness of home in the dual sense is never neatly resolved. Espiritu acknowledges that immigrant resistance against white-dominated culture rests upon the policing of Filipina women's bodies, autonomy, and personal decision-making, thereby rendering the home and family a contested space. In this case, the social obligation of the daughter to understand the stance of resistance of the family to racism may result in maintaining a position of subordination in which the two ethical impulses are at odds with each other. The dutiful Filipina daughter's interest in resisting social injustice grates upon and informs the social obligation of the family. The compliance with the expectations of amor propio, which might involve accepting the limits placed on one's autonomy and personal decision-making, leaves a resonance, a mood of a feminist acting in bad faith. The Cordelian option of desertion might look more appealing and perhaps more feminist. But would desertion really be feminist and could the act be regarded as consistent with Filipino culture enacted by a genuine Filipina daughter, one whose elemental claim to the family centrally defines her identity?

Gloria Anzaldúa was a Chicana feminist writer who wrote from the standpoint of growing up in the borderlands between Mexico and the US. Straddling three cultures (Mexican, indigenous, and Anglo), Anzaldúa is afraid of going home even though “home” permeates “every sinew and cartilage in my body” (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa1999, 43). She writes, “I abhor some of my culture's ways, how it cripples its women, como burras, our strengths used against us, lowly burras bearing humility with dignity. . . . I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me and which have injured me in the name of protecting me” (43–45). Anzaldúa bravely recognizes how a daughter's cultural homes can be inhospitable to those who transgress its cultural norms. Daughters, in particular, suffer a kind of structural oppression within the family, where the values of gender are enforced. Rather than responding with a radical rejection of one's home, Anzaldúa seeks to reconstruct it. She argues for a rearticulation of the home, not rejecting any of its parts, and creating a new culture. “And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, and my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture” (44). I'm inspired by these simultaneous acts of criticism against the family that yet pause on complete abandonment. Additionally, Anzaldúa enables the creation of new meanings for a daughter's family claim. Anzaldúa reminds me how homes have this “elemental claim” that anchors us to our families, which is expressed as both a departure from but also a creation of new homes and possibilities.

In this sense, homes are unstable places and constantly in transition rather than stable, fixed, and cohesive. The ontological status of homes in Anzaldúa's sense point out the mobility of homes, the promise of renewal and creation. However, in the context of migration and the reality that many families in the Philippines are transnational households, homes cannot practically be viewed as stable or fixed any longer.

A feminist-pragmatist conception of the Filipino daughter's filial relation characterizes this ethical dilemma, fraught with competing claims as to where the daughter's ethical obligation lies: her politics or her family. Any intervention from the outside (including a willful Filipina subject who resists the restrictions at home) would be viewed as intrusive and colonialist. But mere submissiveness to the oppressive family structure supports the domination of women at home.

My father and I have slowly generated an understanding of the limits of our identity. I still maintain a strong duty to care for my parents, to remain embedded within Filipino culture despite my physical departure from my family home. I am reminded of Addams's recommendation to Cordelia “‘that pity, memory, and faithfulness are natural ties,’ and surely as much to be prized as is the development of her own soul” (46). Abandoning the family does not address the social adjustment that is needed to heal the relationship, to heal the soul of the daughter. In this passage, Addams points out the moral landscape for me, a daughter who must deal with the conflict of individual and family claims in search of the wider claim that connects the personal with the social. My dear father and I carefully navigate the limits of my life as a feminist academic and his own duty as the last remaining patriarch of the Manglicmot family. It's an unresolved irony, however, that dancing around the commitment to each other's well-being is ever present. The politics of naming that erupted in my life has been resolved by not speaking of names, authentic identities, and original sources of belonging. Amor propio is carefully navigated with silence. Addams notes “[t]he awkwardness and constraint we experience when two standards of conventions and manners clash but deeply prefigure this deeper difference” (47). I take Addams to acknowledge this fundamental perplexity that pervades filial relations. The loss of either of the claims would be a tragedy. It would “bring ruin to ethical life” (37). What does a Filipina feminist look like? Though not perfect, my reflection as a Filipina feminist daughter and the answer to this question is bounded to home, rather insistently, fundamentally embedded within tragedy, perplexity, and ambiguity. The act of silence, a subtle display of respect toward amor propio, similar to that of the Filipino student, might be considered at best as “on the road” to social adjustment. It appears to me that Filipina daughterhood does not require the abandonment of freedom, career, or family obligations. But what is clear is that the filial relation is at the center of and deeply informs a Filipina feminist's ethical reflections. The terrain for social adjustment offers tragedy, perplexity, ambivalence, and wounded affections, as Addams writes. The transformation of home—the new lumber, mortar, and bricks conceived from my own feminist design—ensures that my work, of caring for my family as a dutiful Filipina daughter, continues.