This book focuses on women and the way they feel, act and reflect about their lives, loves and participation in the cooperative movement during the Nicaraguan revolution and the US-backed contra war, which caused the loss of more than 30,000 lives in Nicaragua during the 1980s. Turid Hagene first engaged in the revolutionary process as the interpreter for a brigade of Norwegian coffee pickers in 1985. In 1992, she began ethnographic research on the ways in which Nicaraguan women participated in a cooperative project promoted by Norwegian development agencies in the small town of San Juan. The projects aimed to create small industries to improve women's living conditions and facilitate their empowerment. Women learnt new skills, such as reading, writing, administration, management and the law, necessary to institutionalise new practices and discourses related to the construction of a post-revolutionary society (p. 31).

Hagene's case study analyses how women working in the Esperanza Cooperative narrate their lives in relation to the changing local and national context, considering how new experiences – including education, higher salaries and travel outside the country – interacted with their sentimental relations with men, their ideals and practices of conjugality, family, their religious and political worldviews, and their images of themselves as social agents and actors – workers, mothers, lovers, activists, and so forth. Women's narratives were crafted around common ideals of romantic love, collaborative life partners and shared expectations of social betterment, and the real experience and outcomes of entering the arenas of sexual competition between women for the attention and love of a man. Hagene argues that in Nicaragua, adult women and men operate within a tension caused not only by actions motivated by romantic and revolutionary discourses, but also by the competition among women and men for sexual, economic, social and political favours. The arena of love and sexual competition is where revolutionary ideals, patriarchy, patronage, war practices and transnational cooperative projects interact with the everyday life of activism, economic and social organisation and political contestation.

Hagene argues that women's emotional dependency on men is a powerful device that links sex and emotions between women and men to the reproduction of women's subordination to men, gender asymmetries, social inequalities and women's invisibility as social actors. Marianismo, defined as a woman's natural desire to sacrifice herself for the good of others, such as children or society, and its counterpart, machismo (that is, manliness conceived in terms of the natural desire of a man to conquer women and to ‘father’ many children) pose obstacles to the empowerment of women as autonomous social actors. Whereas women seek love and conjugality and might encounter male indifference, absence or simply no men at all, men seek attention and reproductive possibilities, being less concerned to secure one stable sexual partner. Hagene explores the connections between polygamous relationships, seasonal work on coffee and cotton plantations, rural life and war. Her detailed descriptions analyse the interplay between experiences, memories and testimony in order to support her broader argument that polygamous relationships have nothing to do with a given ‘male nature’, but rather with the dialectic of ‘male culture’ that shapes females and males as agents. In Nicaragua, women are able to develop as strong and autonomous economic agents and are willing to take risks in order to improve their material living conditions. However, emotional binds seem to accompany these material and practical strengths in such a way that women feel depressed or sad if they find no partner to relate to as the years pass.

In the first chapter of the book, the author outlines her phenomenological approach to women's emotional life and its motivations, determinants and outcomes. She defines the relationship between the body, emotions and the social in terms of the interplay between lived experiences, (linguistic) categories and memories. In order to create knowledge about the ways in which human experiences and emotions structure both the subjective representation of the self and society, the researcher has to grasp how particular subjects elaborate their past and present actions and experiences through a given set of learnt and internalised discursive categories. Hagene collected interviews and engaged in participant observation in the Esperanza Cooperative at a number of different times between 1992 and 1999. She cites from ten interviews and focuses on three specific life histories in detail. From the point of view of the women, their experience of participation in the Esperanza Cooperative was connected with gaining access to education, health care, property, housing and employment. Nevertheless, they also regarded the ‘Sandinista State’ – Daniel Ortega – as a charitable patron. In fact, Hagene sees the cooperatives as a ‘revolutionary variant’ of the old institution of patronage. However, participating in the cooperatives supported the development of new definitions of the self for these women, based on material improvement and access to social services. Even if income-generating work was not new, women earned more than in the previous decades, something which contributed to a shift in conjugal power relations in their favour, albeit without completely changing patriarchal arrangements, particularly in the case of absentee fathers. Hagene's emphasis on multiple power relations reveals the strategies deployed by her informants to negotiate their lives over time. One of the greatest strengths of the book is her ability to illustrate theoretical concerns with vivid images of the lives of strong and determined women. Her study not only illuminates gender relations in revolutionary Nicaragua, but also contributes to the history of women in the region overall.