"You don't need balls!" - Women in media honored by St. Scholastica's

Led exuberantly for many years by the still-active activist nun, Sister Mary John Mananzan, St. Scholastica's College Manila chose for its annual Hildegarde Lifetime Achievement Award on Saturday a similarly irreverent and outspoken woman, Gilda Cordero-Fernando, the writer, painter and as close to a Renaissance woman as our era has produced.  True to form, her acceptance speech sounded more like a humorous short story that revolved around her recent illness and the various remedies that family and friends offered her. 

Gilda, 79, said she finally dragged herself to a hospital, where she saw a doctor and promptly "coughed all over his chairs, his books, his photographs, his diplomas and him. After 40 minutes he prescribed the most potent antibiotics ever produced by man. The capsules gave me a stomach ache, a headache, a toothache, an ear ache and a chill. Finally my cough was gone," Fernando said, her voice still slightly hoarse. "I still wonder if it was the antibiotics that cured me. I am inclined to believe that it was more the love and the caring of friends that made me well." Then she delivered her rousing last lines. "Go forth into the world and fight your just fight," she told her audience of mostly young women. "And don’t let anyone tell you that you have balls. You don’t need them!" Other awardees