“Angsioco’s passing leaves a void”
I HAD been working with Ms. Elizabeth Angsioco for several years – she as opinion columnist for this newspaper and I as opinion editor –before I was able to get to know her better. That happened, of all places, via Zoom, in May 2022 when I requested her to talk to my students on how her advocacy fed and sustained her writing.
She shared some details of her early life that got her into activism: Her father used to work in Subic and it was there, as a child, that she observed the lives of women in prostitution. Her mother died when she was in Grade 6, forcing her to live with her grandmother and her aunt in an urban poor community in San Juan here in Metro Manila. “We were very poor so we had to make do with what we had,” she said. “Early on I learned to exist and survive on my own.”
A product of the public school system, the young Beth’s ultimate dream was to have an owner-type jeepney.
When she was 18, she worked for an office supplies company. The rank-and-file employees formed a union to assert their rights, and went on a six-month strike. Beth joined the union even though she was not supposed to because she was already a manager. Of course, she was fired.
The next few years saw her furthering her involvement in several political groups, anchored on feminism and social democracy/social justice. She became a founding member of the Democratic Socialist Women of the Philippines, and eventually its national chairperson (this was how we met, at the height of the conversations on the reproductive health bill). Her affiliations with various groups brought her to meetings and conferences in other countries, and she was able to observe how other governments worked to address their problems.
If I remember correctly, it was sometime in 2010 when she started writing for Manila Standard. Her column, Power Point, covered a broad range of topics. She wrote about gender issues, children’s rights, domestic violence, workers’ plight – areas with which she was familiar. But she also wrote about politics and history; she was never bashful about where she stood. She called out officials for their misdeeds or inadequacies.
But Ms. Beth was always respectful. Her pieces contained facts that supported her position, either through documents and statistics, or actual conversations with people with high stakes in the issue. Her advocacy work took her to the halls of Congress or government agencies – she was a consultant on the technical aspects of bills – but also to the slums, to the homes of women whose experiences she knew too well.
Someone like Ms. Beth should then be confident about knowing what she was doing – there are many out there with a fraction of her experience and 10 times the bravado. But in the two times I requested her to speak to my journalism students (the other time was just last November, face to face), she was initially reluctant to do so, not quite sure whether she could give the students the input they needed. In both times, however, the students and I came off more convinced than ever that in order to dish out good opinion, one must first consistently seek to know.
Like many others, I scrolled my social media feeds more often in the past rainy week or so. On Facebook I saw that Ms. Beth posted a photo of herself with her three grown children at a restaurant. Now that they all had lives of their own, it was special to get them together at the same time, she said. But it was her birthday and they gave her a treat – she had just turned 67. On Instagram was a photo of her in her rubber shoes, but using white socks; she said she just realized she had no black ones. A few weeks ago, she sounded elated at the idea of writing the introduction to a history book.
So when I saw an FB post by her daughter, saying that Ms Beth had passed earlier on July 23, I did not immediately believe it. Had she passed on, really, when she sounded excited and still full of ideas on how she could help make a difference?
Ms. Beth’s passing is a loss not only to her family and personal friends but to her larger circle — to me, who held her in great admiration and esteem, and to the countless women and communities whom she got to know, and whom she inspired to take charge of their lives notwithstanding the many forces that threatened to defeat them.
You will be missed, Ma’am. adellechua@gmail.com
