While women have largely remained marginalized in Philippine history, an increasing number of works in recent decades have underscored their roles in the “public sphere”, participating in broad historical processes such as the Philippine Revolution, the women’s suffrage movement in the 1930s, and the Second World War, to name a few. Despite the generally accepted views that women were made for motherhood by virtue of their biology, their role as a mother in the more “private sphere” such as the home, has eluded examination and remain unexplored.

In this paper, I interrogate the concept of motherhood as it is presented and constructed in early twentieth century Philippine magazines such as the Revista Filipina and The Philippine Magazine. Through the representations of motherhood found in these magazines, I analyze societal expectations and norms imposed on women and explore how the Filipino woman in the early twentieth century stood at the brink of emerging contestations between traditional perspectives of domesticity and liberal views of modernity.