Women

Her Stories: Investigative Reports
on Filipino Women in the 1990s

Finalist: National Book Award for Journalism (1999)

THIS COLLECTION of investigative reports published in major Philippine newspapers from 1995 to 1999 chronicles the travails and triumphs of Filipino women in the last decade of the 20th century.

During this decade, the country’s first female president ended her term, more women were elected to the legislature, and several laws recognizing the rights of women were passed. At the same time, there was also a “feminization” of some of the Philippines’s most serious problems: poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, and the social consequences brought about by large-scale overseas migration.

Women in Brackets: A Chronicle
of Vatican Power and Control

MARILEN Dañguilan has been a warrior in a war of liberation, and this book is a chronicle of that war—the war for women’s bodies, women’s rights, and women’s choices.

The stories that Marilen tells may bear familiar outlines, especially for those who followed the back-and-forth between Church and State around the time of the Cairo and the Beijing women’s conference. But her accounts of these skirmishes acquire an entertaining edge by the deft way she sketches characters, her sense of irony and the telling detail, and the way she builds up suspense as the fraying edges of public opinion threaten to rip apart the social fabric.

Comfort Woman: Slave of Destiny

In this gripping autobiography, Ma. Rosa Henson recalls her childhood as the illegitimate daughter of a big landowner, her wartime ordeal and her decision to go public with a secret she had kept for fifty years.