Former President Corazon Aquino and Rappler CEO Maria Ressa have been included in Time magazine’s Most Influential Women of the century.
(#LadyBoss: Philippines With Most Women Executives)
“The women profiled here enlarged their world and explored new ones, broke free of convention and constraint, welcomed into community the lost and left behind. They were the different drummers, to whose beat a century marched without always even knowing it,” said former Time editor-in-chief Nancy Gibbs of the list.
Cory Aquino was named Time’s Person of the Year in 1986 after defending democracy and winning the presidency to end the Marcos regime.
“That democracy has endured on the archipelago. So have its power structures: a tradition of elite rule helped her son 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,” Karl Vick wrote in his piece of Aquino.
Ressa was likewise named Time’s Person of the Year in 2018 for being among “The Guardians”, defenders of press freedom in a time that was “marked by manipulation and abuse of information.”
“But the news site 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,” TIME wrote in its piece about Ressa.
Joining Aquino and Ressa on the list are the likes of Princess Diana of Wales, Madonna, Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and athlete Serena Williams amongst many others.
“With this 100 Women of the Year 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,” Time stated.
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