Within the Huk guerrilla forces, Vina Lanzona writes, attitudes to women were ‘hesitant and contradictory’. This is an understatement. Practically all the top-ranking leaders were members of the Philippine Communist Party (PKP), which professed to treat women comrades ‘on an equal basis with men’ and to help them ‘equip themselves for positions of leadership and responsibility’. And yet in reality, says Lanzona, the party advanced only a handful of women to high positions. The great majority of the women who lived in the Huks’ forest encampments in the 1940s and 1950s were consigned to the traditional roles of cooking, washing, housekeeping and childcare, and the party was ‘allowing most to serve the sexual needs of male leaders’. The military culture that prevailed in the camps was ‘quite abusive’, and as the rebellion faced defeat its male leaders increasingly held women to blame for its reverses, to the point that a ‘climate of misogyny’ came to prevail. Women, babies and families came to be seen less as assets that vitalised and sustained the movement than as ‘problems’, and when these ‘problems’ were debated the male leaders did not listen to women's opinions. In matters of sex and gender, Lanzona concludes, ‘the Huks in many ways failed to liberate themselves from the very cultural traditionalism that they were fighting against’. The camps replicated, even exaggerated, the inequities of mainstream society.

In the course of her fieldwork, in the 1990s, Lanzona interviewed over a hundred Huk veterans – 70 women and 32 men – and it is around their fascinating testimonies that she constructs her book. If she had not succeeded in tracking them down and winning their confidence, their individual and collective histories would have been lost, for now their generation is passing away. Most came from peasant backgrounds and spoke mainly in Tagalog, but their words are translated here lucidly, and their personalities and passions are captured vividly. Their recollections, thankfully, do not get buried beneath scholarly jargon, and are adroitly structured. The five semi-chronological, semi-thematic chapters discuss in turn the wartime, anti-Japanese phase of the Huk struggle; the post-war demobilisation and subsequent remobilisation of the guerrilla forces; the biographies of the most prominent Huk women; ‘Love and sex in a time of revolution’; and lastly the legacy of the Huk women. Gender theory necessarily informs the study, but its incursions into the text are kept to a prudent and pertinent minimum.

For all these virtues, Lanzona deserves high praise. But perhaps the contradictions in Huk attitudes could have been delineated more sharply, their roots probed a little harder. Why was the gulf between theory and practice, between ideal and reality, so wide? Why were the traditional gender norms so entrenched, and what exactly were they? At different junctures they are variously called ‘patriarchal’, ‘Catholic’ and ‘bourgeois’, but these terms are not elaborated or given substance. Rather than explicating the contradictions, in fact, Lanzona compounds them with inconsistencies of her own. Seemingly torn at times between positive and negative evaluations, she confuses the reader by giving both. She relates, for example, that sex, gender and family issues were recognised by Huk leaders as ‘crucial’ and ‘integral’ to the movement, but says elsewhere that ultimately they were seen as ‘peripheral and harmful’. At one point, she describes PKP policy statements such as ‘The Revolutionary Solution to the Sex Problem’ as ‘creating a space’ for women and being ‘receptive’ to women's problems, but at another point she laments how they provided ‘no space for women to express their views and needs’ and failed ‘to address the coercion of women’. Inconsistencies also bedevil her periodisation of events, and her engagement with the debate about whether the PKP did, or did not, lead the Huks. On this question, she not only seems at different times to accept both sides of the argument, but also tosses two other possibilities into the ring — that the Huks were remobilised after the war by ‘former’ PKP leaders, and, bizarrely misconstruing another scholar, that the rebellion was a phase in the peasantry's prolonged struggle ‘to undermine’ the PKP's revolutionary role. Possibly these follies were just slips of the pen, but how are readers to know?

Previous works on the Huks have virtually ignored the involvement of women and the importance of gender issues, and Lanzona commendably remedies that deficiency. In redressing the past neglect, however, she occasionally tends to overcompensate, and to claim too much for her subject. She asserts, for instance, that the Huks, by mobilising women and professing (if not practising) sexual equality, ‘instituted’ a sexual and gender revolution in the Philippines — a judgement that slights the nationalist, radical and women's movements of earlier decades, movements she mentions fleetingly but then seems to forget. She contends that the Huks became one of the most effective anti-Japanese guerrilla forces during the war ‘as a result’ of mobilising women as well as men, a claim that patently elides the many other factors critical to their success. And finally she suggests that it was the Huks’ mishandling of sex, gender and family issues that ‘placed the movement on the defensive’ and ‘led to its permanent decline’. The consensus view is that the Huk rebellion failed because it was confined to just a few provinces; because a ‘revolutionary situation’, contrary to the PKP's estimate, did not exist; and because the United States provided substantial military assistance to help the Philippine army suppress the insurgency. It is no doubt true, as Lanzona says, that as rebellion faltered the culture in the Huk encampments became more ‘masculine’ and the guerrillas became more isolated from their families and communities. But surely, these were the consequences of retreat and defeat, not the causes.