Filipino peasant women

Filipino Peasant Women presents a compelling example of the power of the powerless. In it, author Ligaya Lindio-McGovern offers the first study of the everyday lives of Filipino peasant women and their means of resisting the exploitative system in which they find themselves. While illustrating the increasing exploitation and poverty these women face, Lindio-McGovern challenges the conventional portrayal of them as submissive victims. 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. At the heart of the book, however, is the contention that the best solutions to the exploitation of peasants come from the peasants themselves. Stories of the women's experiences told from their own perspectives illustrate how these women have resisted their oppression through organization and consciousness-raising, land occupation, the founding of worker collectives and consumer cooperatives, and the establishment of day care centers. Lindio-McGovern identifies the creative alternatives such grassroots organizations can offer for shaping development policies and empowerment strategies for poor women and their families. Offering a feminist methodology for studying Third World women in militarized zones, Filipino Peasant Women is essential reading in the fields of women's studies anthropology, sociology, and Asian studies.