SAN PEDRO—"Perhaps if women had never lost parity with men and we live in a society that honors both genders equally, we wouldn’t even need an International Women’s Day," declared Dr. Leny Mendoza Strobel, an Associate Professor of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University, and a cultural and community advocate.

The celebration of International Women’s Day, which began in 1911 and celebrated in 63 countries and 982 events this year, is a "gesture of multiculturalism in its conservative form," according to Dr. Strobel, who spoke at the Men Reading Women’s Writings luncheon held at the Ports of Call Restaurant in San Pedro on Saturday, March 28. Her speech was entitled The Power of Healing: Remembering our Babaylan Spirit.

"Human beings are not born violent, do you agree?" she began. "We now have access to accounts that tell us of prehistoric huntergatherer societies that lived in balance with nature and harmony with each other and with other species. They had conflicts, but they did not have war."

Dr. Strobel said that even today, according to Filipino author Katrin de Guia, in the Philippine island of Palawan, there are still indigenous peoples that do not have a word for war in their language. "When developers began to encroach on their ancestral domains, they mainly avoided the conflict by moving deeper into the forest."

Historians write that matriarchal societies ended at the beginning of the agricultural era 10,000 years ago. That era also marked the beginning of patriarchal civilizations. "Matriarchal societies," says Dr. Strobel, "are non-hierarchical, egalitarian and deemed the relationship to the universe and all species as sacred. With the rise and evolution of patriarchy, these feminine values and energies were repressed and exiled into the narrow spaces of expression under the control of patriarchal institutions and systems."

Philippine Society in general is under-guarded by an egalitarian, lateral kinship system, according to a talk by Filipino professor Jaime Veneracion, at a lecture he delivered to a group of Fullbright scholars that included Dr. Strobel. "This is the reason," says Dr. Strobel, "why we have a difficult time adjusting to the requirements of modernity because underneath all these modern impositions is a bilateral egalitarian system."