Filipino Women

Three novellas--including Obsession, Platinum, and Cadena de Amor--examine the Philippine experience through the lives of three female characters, a prostitute, a student activist, and a politician.

By linking the experiences of immigrant families with the increased reliance on cheap and flexible workers for care and domestic work in Southern Europe, this study documents the lived experiences of neglected actors of globalization — migrant women — as well as the transformations of Western families more generally. However, while describing in detail the structural and cultural contexts within which these women have to operate, the book questions dominant paradigms about women as passive victims of patriarchal structures and brings out instead their agency and the creative ways in which they take control of their lives in often difficult circumstances. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the author offers a valuable dual comparison between two Southern European countries on the one hand and between two migrant groups, one Christian and one Muslim, on the other, thus bringing to light unique detailed data on migration decision-making, settlement and on the multiple ways in which different women cope with the consequences of their transnational lives.

During World War II more than one thousand Filipinas were kidnapped by the Imperial Japanese Army. Lolas’ House tells the stories of sixteen surviving Filipino “comfort women.” M. Evelina Galang enters into the lives of the women at Lolas’ House, a community center in metro Manila. She accompanies them to the sites of their abduction and protests with them at the gates of the Japanese embassy. Each woman gives her testimony, and even though the women relive their horror at each telling, they offer their stories so that no woman anywhere should suffer wartime rape and torture. Lolas’ House is a book of testimony, but it is also a book of witness, of survival, and of the female body. Intensely personal and globally political, it is the legacy of Lolas’ House to the world.

The writers discussed here are Merlie Alunan, Sylvia Mayuga, Marra PL. Lanot, Elsa Martinez Coscolluela, and Rosario Cruz Lucero.

This book is about a fundamental aspect of the feminist project in the Philippines: rethinking the Filipino woman. It focuses on how contemporary women's organizations have represented and refashioned the Filipina in their campaigns to improve women's status by locating her in history, society and politics; imagining her past, present and future; representing her in advocacy; and identifying strategies to transform her. The drive to alter the situation of women included a political aspect (lobbying and changing legislation) and a cultural one (modifying social attitudes and women’s own assessments of themselves). In this work Mina Roces examines the cultural side of the feminist agenda: how activists have critiqued Filipino womanhood and engaged in fashioning an alternative woman. How did activists theorize the Filipina and how did they use this analysis to lobby for pro-women’s legislation or alter social attitudes? What sort of Filipina role models did women’s organizations propose, and how were these new ideas disseminated to the general public? What cultural strategies did activists deploy in order to gain a mass following? Analyzing data from over seventy five interviews with feminist activists, radio and television shows, romance novels, periodicals and books published by women’s organizations and feminist nuns, comics, newsletters, and personal papers, Roces shows how representations of the Filipino woman have been central to debates about women’s empowerment. She explores the transnational character of women’s activism and offers a seminal study on the important contributions of feminist Catholic nuns. Women’s Movements and the Filipina provides an original and passionate account of the contemporary feminist movement in the Philippines, bringing to light how women’s organizations have initiated change in cultural attitudes and had a significant impact on contemporary Philippine society.

For many Filipinos, one word – kumusta, how are you – is all it takes to forge a connection with a stranger anywhere in the world. In Canada’s Prairie provinces, this connection has inspired community building and created both national and transnational identities for the women who identify as Pinay. This book is the first to look beyond traditional metropolitan hubs of settlement to explore the migration of Filipino women in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Based on interviews with first-generation immigrant Filipino women and temporary foreign workers, this book explores how the shared experience of migration forms the basis for new identities, communities, transnational ties, and multiple levels of belonging in Canada. A groundbreaking look at the experience of Filipino women in Canada, Bonifacio’s work is simultaneously an investigation of feminism, migration, diaspora, and the rubric of multiculturalism in a global era.

A Filipina from the peasant class herself, the author has unprecedented access to women workers in this militarized society as well as rich insights into the lives of Third World women. Her interviews with members of the National Federation of Peasant Women in the Philippines and its local chapter, Peasant Women of Mindoro, detail women's landlessness, poverty, and disempowerment.