Workbook
For Filipino (American) Women
A Workbook on Family Obligation, OFW Legacy, and Becoming Someone Who Also Gets to Be Loved
You were raised to give. This is where you figure out what you get to keep.
Filipino American women — first-generation, 1.5-generation, and second-generation — raised inside the weight of utang na loob (debt of gratitude), family remittance obligation, and the expectation that a good Filipina sacrifices for everyone around her. Women who have given everything and are now asking what belongs to them.
The Name It First Experience
You learned early that love means sacrifice. You watched the people who raised you work impossible hours, send money home, hold multiple jobs, and never complain. You internalized the lesson. This workbook does not ask you to stop caring for the people you love. It asks you to name — precisely and on paper — the difference between care you chose and obligation you absorbed, and what the woman underneath all of that giving actually needs and deserves. Grounded in Racial Identity Development theory (Cross, Helms), Acculturation Theory (Berry), Intersectionality (Crenshaw), diasporic identity scholarship (Brah, Hall), and research on Filipino American women's identity and the OFW diaspora experience, this workbook moves through inherited sacrifice, family obligation, and the self-defined agreement you write now. The work is yours to do. This is where you write it down. You leave with The Filipino (American) Women Agreement.
You can opt into 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins from your account. We recommend you do — the point is to see what changed.
Sample questions
- What do you call the giving that has no bottom — the one where there is always someone who needs more than you had left?
- When you imagine being cared for the way you care for others, what stops the thought before it finishes?
- What would The Filipino (American) Women Agreement say you deserve to receive — not earn, not sacrifice toward, but receive?
Research basis
Cross (1971, 1991) Nigrescence Model adapted for Asian American identity / Helms (1990) racial identity statuses / Berry (1997) acculturation strategies / Crenshaw (1989, 1991) intersectionality / Brah (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora / Hall (1990) Cultural Identity and Diaspora / Espiritu (2003) Home Bound: Filipino American Lives on the margins of empire / Parreñas (2001) Servants of Globalization on Filipina women in the diaspora and OFW remittance culture / cultural frameworks of utang na loob (debt of gratitude), hiya (shame/face), pakikisama (going along/group harmony), and Filipina femininity norms / Root (1997) Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity / Bonus (2000) Locating Filipino Americans / colonial mentality in Filipino American identity (David & Okazaki, 2006) / Pyke & Johnson (2003) on Asian American women and femininities applied to Filipino American women.
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