Amazons of the Huk Rebellion: Gender, Sex, and Revolution in the Philippines (review)

To a young woman in the Japanese-occupied Philippines during World War II, running off into the hills to join the guerrilla resistance might have seemed like a good idea. Whereas some might have been motivated to avoid rape or murder, many women became dedicated to the guerrillas' aims. Some married guerrillas. Either way, once the war was over, many women stayed in the forest and continued fighting. The media loved female warriors and ran almost daily stories on these "Amazons."

This is the world Vina Lanzona writes about in Amazons of the Huk Rebellion. Lanzona grew up in the Philippines, where she was a leftist student obsessed with revolutions, the struggle against the Spanish in the Philippine Revolution, against the Americans during the Philippine-American War, and against the Japanese in World War II. As a young woman during President Ferdinand Marcos' regime, Lanzona advocated for political prisoners, visiting them weekly. After Marcos left, she worked in Corazon Aquino's government. But the lure of academia called her to the U.S. to study. She started off at New York's New School for Social Research, then got her doctorate in history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Lanzona was fascinated by the Huk Rebellion, which started as an anti-Japanese movement during World War II, and then continued as a communist guerrilla movement when the new Philippine republic continued many of the same old colonial policies. Membership peaked in 1950 with about 20,000 guerrillas and 100,000 active supporters. By 1956, the movement was in decline, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many leaders were caught or surrendered.

Lanzona was especially interested in the part women played in the rebellion, which had not been well-documented in other studies. She returned to the Philippines to interview former Huk rebels in 1993, and spent two years conducting research. In that time, she formally interviewed seventy women and thirty-two men. Her narrators ranged in age from 62 to 88 years. The interviews lasted from one to twenty hours and were conducted in Tagalog. She also spoke informally to many more Huk women. She found the women eager to speak about their personal, as well as political, lives as Huk rebels. Many were nostalgic for their guerrilla lives. They were generally positive and expressed few regrets.

In addition to her interviews, Lanzona used captured documents of the Philippine communist politburo, which were issued as directives to the Huk guerrillas, and contemporary magazines and newspapers to round out her portrayal of the Huks. The book is divided into five long chapters: Huk women and the Japanese occupation; Huk women, nationalism, and the communist revolution; women leaders in the Huk movement; love and sex in the Huk movement; and Amazons in the unfinished revolution. It is mostly narrative text, with many ideas and examples and short snippets of the interviews here and there. I would have liked to see this scenario reversed. Considering how many interviews Lanzona did, surely she could have included longer and livelier excerpts.

"The Huk rebellion was the most important peasant movement in Philippine history, the most successful resistance army in Asia during World War II, and the first major communist rebellion defeated by US counterinsurgency operations," Lanzona writes. "But the Huks were important for another, lesser-known reason: theirs was the first major political and military organization in the country to include and actively recruit women" (7).

About one in ten active guerrillas were female. Women mostly stayed in villages, where they collected money, information, and supplies for guerrillas. As the movement went on, some women undertook more dangerous jobs. Huk women gathered intelligence on the Japanese and transported documents beneath their clothes. Some became combatants, and a few women were even commanders.

Although the communist Huks welcomed women into their ranks more than previous armies of the world had, female guerrillas were still controversial...