I find nothing wrong with the usage of the word “Filipina,” but I personally prefer “Filipino woman” over that term. You’re right, though, that a brouhaha took place in the late 1990s over a report that the
Oxford English Dictionary had made an unsavory and degrading entry in its definition of “Filipina.” That report seems to have turned out to be false. Anyway, from what I can gather, the official definition for “Filipino/Filipina” in the OED is as follows:
“A. n. A native or inhabitant of the Philippine islands, especially one of Spanish or mixed blood. B. adj. Of or pertaining to Filipinos or the Philippine islands.”
Likewise, my digital
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary has this definition for “Filipina”:
Main Entry:
FilipinaFunction: noun
Etymology: Spanish
Date: 1899
: a Filipino girl or woman
It looks like it wasn’t really the OED but a Greek dictionary compiled by a certain George Babiniotis that, in a show of abysmal ignorance and racial insensitivity, had defined the word “Filipineza”—not “Filipina”—as not only a woman from the Philippines but also “a domestic worker from the Philippines or a person who performs non-essential auxiliary tasks.”
I found some reports claiming that this was the second time that the term “Filipina” has been defined as “domestic helper.”
An entry in Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers by Nicole Constable makes a reference to the OED having defined a “Filipino” as such sometime during the term of Philippine President Corazon Aquino. The Philippine government was reported to have protested that reference and that the OED duly amended that entry. However, I couldn’t find any corroborating source that the OED had indeed made that linguistic faux pas, nor that it actually made the amendment to the offending definition.
On the whole, I must say that we can only view this unpalatable chain of events as part of the huge price the Philippines has to pay for its great—no, overwhelming—economic dependence on the labor diaspora.