A Filipino feminist who united national liberation and women’s emancipation

By Harsh Thakor* 

Maria Lorena Barros epitomized the conviction that revolution is impossible without the total liberation of women, and that the struggle for national liberation and the struggle for women’s liberation are one and the same.

On March 24, 1976, a column of revolutionary fighters from the New People’s Army was ambushed by the Armed Forces of the Philippines in the mountains of Mauban, Quezon. Among those martyred in the hail of bullets was a 28-year-old woman whose short but incandescent life posed a radical challenge to the twin tyrannies of feudal patriarchy and American-backed dictatorship: Maria Lorena “Lorie” Barros. This year marks the 50th anniversary of her martyrdom.

To the Marcos regime, then in its fourth year of martial law declared in 1972, her death was hailed as a significant blow in the counter-insurgency war. For the revolutionary movement, it represented an irreparable loss—not merely of a militant, but of a theorist, organizer, and symbol who sought to fuse the national democratic struggle with the liberation of women from “the bondage of the home and the yoke of tradition.”

Barros carved a permanent place among the most revered heroes of the anti-dictatorship struggle, those who confronted death defiantly at the hands of government soldiers deep in the forests of the Sierra Madre. Her life and death testified that revolutionary change often demands the ultimate sacrifice. Her writings, her daring escape from prison, and her decision to wage armed struggle alongside the peasantry embodied the leftist principle of praxis—the unity of theory and action.

A Life of Awakening

From early childhood, Barros displayed keen intelligence, an inquiring mind, and a precocious social awareness, nurtured by her mother, Alicia Morelos. A granddaughter of a Katipunero and herself a veteran of the Hukbalahap guerrilla resistance, Alicia became her daughter’s closest friend and confidante.

Barros excelled academically, earning honors from grade school through college. She graduated from the University of the Philippines with a degree in anthropology in 1970 and began teaching while pursuing master’s studies. She was already gaining recognition as a writer, publishing poetry and essays in various outlets and eventually serving as president of the UP Writers Club.

By the late 1960s, Lorie Barros received her baptism into political activism. She participated in exposure trips to rural areas and immersed herself in radical political literature. Against the backdrop of neocolonial exploitation—where the Philippines, a former American colony, remained economically subservient to U.S. interests—Barros joined the radicalization of the Filipino petite bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. The presidency of Ferdinand Marcos, initially viewed as reformist, had devolved into a dictatorship propped up by American military aid from the Clark and Subic bases and the systematic plunder of national wealth.

The First Quarter Storm of 1970, a wave of massive student-led protests against rising living costs, police brutality, and Philippine support for the Vietnam War, marked a turning point. As a UP student, Barros played a central role. Unlike liberal feminists of the era, she analyzed women’s subjugation as inextricably linked to imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism.

Founding MAKIBAKA

In 1969, amid this upheaval, she co-founded MAKIBAKA—the Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan, or Free Movement of New Women—and became its first chairperson. The organization’s name reflected its core belief: women’s liberation was not a separate issue but an integral part of the broader anti-dictatorship and anti-imperialist struggle.

MAKIBAKA represented a critical shift in Philippine feminism. It rejected the liberal illusion that women’s emancipation could be achieved through individual career advancement or piecemeal legislative reforms within a capitalist and authoritarian framework. Instead, Barros and her comrades argued that genuine liberation required the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship, the dismantling of American neocolonial control, and the uprooting of feudal patriarchy—where women were treated as private property and subjected to double exploitation as laborers and reproducers of the workforce.

Barros insisted that women should not remain mere auxiliaries—cooking, nursing, or providing logistical support—but must become military commanders, political organizers, and intellectuals. Her underground writings sharply critiqued the machismo that persisted even within leftist movements. She and other women activists recognized the necessity of a dedicated women’s organization to address issues that broader groups had sidelined, to combat imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism while simultaneously advancing women’s emancipation and drawing the widest possible participation of women into the revolutionary fold.

Initially, some comrades opposed a separate women’s group, fearing it would divide the ranks. Barros countered that in a semi-feudal, semi-colonial, and patriarchal society, such an organization was essential to tackle structural inequalities and to strengthen the overall struggle against Marcos and the system he represented.

Arrest, Escape, and Guerrilla Life

When martial law descended in 1972, the regime unleashed a wave of terror against activists, journalists, and students. Barros was arrested and imprisoned. Far from breaking her, the experience further radicalized her. She observed that state violence was deeply gendered: women prisoners faced sexual harassment, while the regime sought to “rehabilitate” them into submissive domestic roles.

Barros placed no faith in the legal system. In a bold act of defiance, she escaped from prison in 1975 and went fully underground. For a woman of her educated, middle-class background, the choice to join the New People’s Army in the countryside represented a complete rejection of the life the bourgeois state had mapped out for her. She became a political instructor and fighter in the guerrilla zones.

There, she worked to implement the NPA’s policies on women’s rights—advocating equal pay, the abolition of feudal practices like pamamanhikan (which she saw as the commodification of women), and the creation of mechanisms to combat gender-based violence within the revolutionary ranks themselves.

Final Stand

By early 1976, the Marcos regime, supported by American advisers and equipment, had intensified counter-insurgency operations in Southern Luzon. On March 24, 1976, in Cagsiay, Mauban, Quezon, Barros and her comrades were tracked down. In the ensuing armed encounter, she was seriously wounded. Captors offered medical treatment in exchange for cooperation, but she refused. Lorena Barros was killed alongside fellow revolutionary Celia Marquez. Accounts describe her firing back until her gun jammed, then attempting to escape before being shot.

Her body was given a heroine’s farewell by family and comrades. They marched with her coffin singing revolutionary songs, risking arrest, while a well-attended necrological service was held at the UP campus. The regime branded her and her comrades as terrorists. From the revolutionary perspective, however, her death was an act of counter-revolutionary violence aimed at silencing a figure who embodied the dangerous fusion of peasant mobilization and women’s awakening.

Enduring Legacy

The assassination of Lorena Barros did not extinguish the movement she helped ignite. Instead, it helped forge what would become known as Filipino revolutionary feminism. In the years that followed, the women’s movement both broadened and deepened. The Gabriela alliance, founded in 1984 as a national democratic women’s organization, carried forward the spirit of MAKIBAKA and remains one of the largest of its kind in the Philippines today.

Barros’s legacy lies in her insistence on integrating gender liberation into class-based revolution. She diagnosed that no true revolution is possible without the total liberation of women, and that any feminism that reconciles with imperialism and feudalism remains a reformist project that ultimately strengthens capitalism.

On March 24, progressive circles in the Philippines remembered not merely the death of a revolutionary, but the living truth she embodied: that the struggle for national liberation and the struggle for women’s liberation are inseparable. In the continuing resistance against authoritarianism, land grabs, and extrajudicial killings, the spirit of MAKIBAKA endures as a beacon for those who understand that genuine emancipation demands the eradication of all forms of hierarchy.

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*Freelance journalist