To admire and emulate

The nation lost Leticia Ramos Shahani to illness, but the diplomat, feminist, lawmaker, mother, college dean, and farmer left a legacy for Filipinos to admire and emulate.

As one of the first few women to crash the male-dominated diplomatic corps, she proved herself exceptional, eventually rising to become the highest ranking woman at the United Nations, where she became secretary general of the UN Conference on the Decade for Women in 1985. As a two-term senator, she authored landmark bills that addressed women’s concerns, such as the Anti-Rape Law and the beginnings of the reproductive health bill. She lent her expertise to craft the Fisheries Code, the US Bases Conversion Law, and the laws that created the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (popularly known as Tesda).

Family genes may have started her on the road to diplomacy and politics—Foreign Secretary Narciso Ramos was her father, and former President Fidel V. Ramos her brother—but personal discipline and passion propelled her forward.

Married to an Indian professor and widowed young, she raised three children while pursuing her advocacies using her diplomat’s skills. “Magaling tumimpla” (Adept in the balancing act) is how a former colleague in the women’s movement described her, recalling how Shahani arranged a meeting with the powerful Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin to blunt the Catholic Church’s sharp response to the Beijing conference on women.

Being the perennial leader of the pack made Shahani impatient about the mundane tasks and administrative chores that came with civilian jobs after she retired from the diplomatic corps and the Senate. As dean at Miriam College, she “had grand ideas about the college and very high expectations of the students,” said her former colleague. “In fact, she could be imperious, which left not a few staff quaking in their boots.”

People might call her feisty, but to those who did not meet her standards, she came across as stern and forbidding, the colleague added. “In fact, she had very definite ideas and would cut you off if she disagreed with you. But eventually, she learned to be consultative, and we got along better.”

Despite the crusty exterior, Shahani had a mother’s tender heart when it came to her children. “Once her daughter Lila wrote a very good piece about the women’s movement and she rightly felt very proud about it,” the colleague recalled, adding that Shahani hoped that former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, their guest at that time, would be able to read it.

The constant hum of life in Shahani’s younger years haunted her well into her senior years and she would always demand follow-up action to events. After the Beijing women’s conference, she always asked, “So what’s happening, why is there no follow-up?” until her Miriam College colleague organized a regular National Summit on Women.

Indeed, another woman activist recalled a chance meeting with Shahani, who immediately demanded to know: “Where is the passion [now]?” She was apparently harking back to the women’s marches bravely launched during martial law. “I told her that women are still active, but the fight is now online,” the activist said.

Shahani was a web of contradictions, her colleague said. “She was a member of Brahma Kumaris but she herself was far from being meditative. She was always fully engaged.”

Among the issues she felt “fully engaged” in was the encroachments on the West Philippine Sea, with her suggesting, not entirely in jest: “Why don’t we women activists form a chain all the way to Panatag Shoal to show our protest over China’s claims?”

In more recent years, she reinvented herself as a dairy farmer, even taking courses on milk production and cheese making. “She called it White Revolution, and would sell the milk and cheese herself at the Salcedo Market in Makati. Her brother, FVR, twitted her about it: Ano, kumikita ka ba diyan?”

It did not matter whether she was turning a profit or not. The new enterprise was one more proof that Shahani was “not one to censor herself.” Living life without limits, pushing the envelope, is easily her biggest legacy.