Cory Aquino, Maria Ressa named among TIME's 'most influential women of the past century'

MANILA, Philippines — TIME magazine recognized the late president Corazon Aquino and veteran journalist Maria Ressa among the “most influential women of the past century.”

Aquino and Ressa are named among the 100 Women of the Year. The international magazine wrote that in the project, "we’re spotlighting influential women who were often overshadowed."

“This includes women who occupied positions from which the men were often chosen, like world leaders Golda Meir and Corazon Aquino, but far more who found their influence through activism or culture,” it added.

The project, former TIME editor-in-chief Nancy Gibbs said, “is an exercise at the ways in which women held power due to systemic inequality. “

Gibbs was also quoted as saying: “Women were wielding soft power long before the concept was defined.”

Aquino and Ressa

TIME recalled the “mythic quality” to Aquino’s ascent from a “well-born and a devout Catholic” with seemingly no political ambitions to becoming an opposition leader and a president.

She was named TIME’s Person of the Year in 1986, the same year the EDSA revolution toppled the dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. She was the first Filipino and the third woman to be named as the magazine’s Person of the Year.

“That democracy has endured on the archipelago,” TIME wrote, but so did the “power structures” of an elite rule that helped propel her son and namesake of her husband, Benigno Aquino III, to “a widely admired term as President.”

“And his coarse, swaggering successor, Rodrigo Duterte, daily demonstrates both the machismo Corazon Aquino overcame, and the value of the principled civility she modeled,” TIME added.

TIME meanwhile noted Ressa’s career as a journalist and how she and three other women started online news site Rappler, which “turned into a global bellwether for free, accurate information at the vortex of two malign forces: one was the angry populism of an elected President with authoritarian inclinations, Rodrigo Duterte; the other was social media.”

Ressa, and staff of the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, were hailed as TIME 2018 Person of the Year as “Guardian in the War on Truth.”

Ressa faces a string of legal suits since the start of the Duterte administration. She slammed the cases as persecution, but the Palace has adamantly denied their hand in the charges against her. — Kristine Joy Patag

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