For most Filipinos, the quintessential image of a young morena garbed in an elaborate pi�a cloth ensemble with a choker round her neck would at once betray the period setting as sometime during the Spanish occupation. Jose Rizal himself fashioned her partly from imagination, but mostly drawing her from a coalescence of several women characters who came into his life.

Later depictions of this Maria Clara would have her standing on the azotea, cooling herself gently with a lace-hemmed fan. She, the demure miss, would lower her eyes and partially hide her face under a veil or behind a curtain when a gentleman would pass by.

Indeed, the charm of a nineteenth century dalaga is as enigmatic and intriguing as Mona Lisa's smile. Many a fashion designer would draw inspiration from her costumes, and many a poet would extol her virtues in romantic verses.

However, few realize how young women like her lived lives as restricted and confined as the clothes they wear, and that these conservative restrictions would survive the turn of the century until American liberalism and mini-skirts finally took over by the mid-1900s.

Born in the year of Rizal's martyrdom, Agapita Lopez was a testimony as to how life was like for young women in the early 1900s. She was one of the few Maria Claras left, if only in the sense that she was raised in the old-fashioned customs rooted in over three centuries of Spanish rule.

Lopez was a pretty lass from Calamba, daughter of middle-class townsfolk who owned a small piece of land. At age 12, she was arranged to be married to a Spaniard, and at 13 she gave birth to her first child.

Contrary to how the same circumstances would be scandalously perceived today, early marriages then was not taboo. Mutual love was hardly a consideration in wedding a couple; incredulously, the only prerequisite was whether the bride-to-be already had her menstruation period. Age differences were not important, either, and it was also very common for girls to marry husbands old enough to be their fathers. Such was Lopez's case; she barely knew the man she married, who was over ten years her senior.