Brazil: geography, history, and culture

Brazilian Women

Redefining Women in Brazil

The history of Brazil in the twentieth century is incredibly volatile and complex. The global re-settling that occurred after World War II had profound effects on the governments and ways of life for many nations, especially those that were still in a period of development, and Brazil was certainly not immune from such changes. As governments and politics shifted, major changes occurred along individual and social lines as well. In Brazil, one of the major social forces that grew in strength in the decades following the close of the war was the feminist movement, which bore some similarities to the feminist movement in the United States but was in other aspects markedly different. The previous history of Brazil as a Catholic and imperialistically dominated country had, of course, a large effect on the social structure of the country, including the division of gender roles. The feminist movement in Brazil can be seen as a direct refutation of the strict patriarchal society that was established by the previous social and moral dogma of the country, defining new roles and rights for women and limitations on the previously broad and blindly self-affirming rights and roles of Brazilian men.

In her book Brazilian Women Speak, Daphne Patai has collected and edited many of her interviews with Brazilian woman in the early 1980s that tell, both explicitly and between the lines, the story of the feminist struggle in Brazil in the latter half of the twentieth century. The women interviewed by Patai do not al come from the same background, have not had the same experiences, and do not necessarily have the same perspectives and opinions. The commonalities that do exist among these women (at least insofar as they appear through Patai's interviews), however, clearly reveal the patriarchal structure against which many Brazilian women rebelled, and the increasing prominence of their position in a society trying to silence them.

These interviews are not all, or even mostly, explicitly about the feminist movement. But even the most basic reading of some of the simplest statements made by the women in these interviews shows the highly subjugated roles of women in traditional Brazilian women and their subsumed senses of their own identity. For instance, the woman identified as Carolina recalls her conflicting feelings regarding feminine dependence on men for purposes of money and a livelihood: "I never worked to support myself. I never wanted to. I didn't mind depending on my father and mother, but not on anyone else. Not even on this boy I loved" (Patai 66). Carolina was raised, as most Brazilian women of her generation, to be submissive and engaged only with domestic life, not concerning herself with work outside the home. Her unwillingness to be dependent on someone, however, even if that someone were a husband, is indicative of the changing attitudes. Though she still did not feel comfortable working, or feel any desire to work, she found a way to support herself without becoming dependent on a man.

Maria Helena, another woman from later in Patai's book, shows a much more direct rejection of masculine dominance, particularly in the context of a marriage. She admits to being something of a lapsed Catholic, which could be seen to tie into her statement that "when I was married, my husband always liked to tell me what to do, but I wouldn't let him. For example, he didn't want our boys to go to school...When he dies, most of them were already in secondary school" (Patai 195). Maria Helena did not completely reject her Church or her husband, but she refused to let either of these institutional structures make decisions for her, or to influence or even dictate what she felt would be most important and advantageous for her family.