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WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS AND THE FILIPINA, 1986-2008. By Mina Roces. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, c2012. x, 277 pp. US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3499-9.
Arguably one of the most prolific Filipina historians writing outside of the Philippines, Australia-based academic Mina Roces has done a great service to Philippine history and the work of Philippine women's movements and adds another single-authored book to her two others, Kinship Politics and Post-War Politics: The Lopez Family, 1946-2000 (2001) and Women, Power and Kinship Politics: Female Power in Post-War Philippines. (1998). She has accomplished in one slim volume what piecemeal journal articles and feminist newsletters have been trying to achieve and/or capture: the rethinking of the Filipino woman from the lens of contemporary women's organizations. How they have refashioned, re-imagined and represented the Filipina in their campaigns and advocacies, how they have imagined their past, present and future, as well as identified and exploited strategies and tactics to transform their lot is not an innocent feminist project to Roces and her research subjects, but rather a conscious political and cultural one. The book has admirably accomplished what it has set to do: bring "to light how women's organizations have initiated change in cultural attitudes and had a significant impact on contemporary society" (backside book jacket).
In three parts, each with two to five chapters, the book sets out its argument on how Filipino feminists deploy "a double narrative"-the "two contrasting discourses-a narrative of victimization and a...