Anarchist and libertarian feminism in Brazil was created as a revolutionary project for material independence from the “sink, kitchen, and bed” triad
~ Eloísa Benvenutti de Andrade, from Patos à Esquerda ~
Anarchist women in Brazil have, from the beginning, made a major contribution to identifying the feminine in the constitution of feminist thought as autonomous, that is, as a thought that is not controlled and critical of the idea of a “human nature” that we cannot rid ourselves of. They promoted strikes using methods and principles advocated by historical anarchists and stood out for this. Anarchist women gained prominence in Brazil amidst an absolutely diverse working class—originating from the processes of abolition of slavery, immigration, war and the illegality and marginality that made up the urban space—in the struggle forged in the hope of a better life. Their demands for better working conditions, shorter working hours and the revolt against unequal wages were also conducted amidst issues of religion, birth control, education and the intellectual emancipation of women. It is worth remembering that women were subjected to a regular work day of almost 16 hours and was plagued by work accidents that caused her mutilations.
Sometimes, using men’s names, pseudonyms or signing only their initials, due to both repression and male domination in public and private environments, they wrote in the anarchist press reflecting on their own issues and their libertarian and revolutionary horizon. Sometimes treated as crazy and hysterical, the fact is that this libertarian horizon promoted the perspective of gender as produced in the field of culture, and not as a biological given or destiny, and therefore contrary to the mythical generality constructed about women. Gender thus came to be understood as the fruit of historicity, that is, of the situation of women and their conditions.
For anarchists, the “woman question” was allocated to political life and no longer to natural life, which deprived women of their own bodies. This was important, as it boosted the feminist perspective as a contextualized movement. The context was (and is) one of oppression, sexism, and exploitation. Thus, anarchist and libertarian feminism in Brazil was created as an ethical-political, radical, and revolutionary project, by acknowledging the need for physical and material independence—from the “sink, kitchen, and bed” triad that kept women dependent on men and in the condition of their sexual servants.
This condition of domination was historically exercised by both the Church and the State, which controlled women’s minds and bodies through marriage, mandatory birth rates, and domestication, whether as mothers, maids, nurses, domestic workers, etc. Anarchists in Brazil have always perceived this relationship of domination by the Church and the State over workers, but especially over women. Therefore, for anarchists, any revolutionary process necessarily involves the liberation of women and femininity. In the anarchist newspaper A Plebe, launched in the city of São Paulo in 1917, anarchist collaborator and activist Theresa Escobar wrote:
(…) Let us transform convents and temples into professional workshops and throw this gang of criminals (priests and nuns), these murderers of freedom of conscience, to any point where they cannot do harm and in return are useful to their fellow men. Enough of infamy, enough of tolerance. The time has come to free women from the slavery imposed by the nefarious selfishness of true social vampires. The day will come when being a Christian will be as ridiculous as having a reputation as a thief is shameful! It is not far off, friends; all it takes is a little audacity and more constancy and a lot of support from conscientious patriots. Long live freedom and death to the clergy!
The anticlerical stance was common among several anarchists who wrote in newspapers such as “A Plebe”. For them, criticism of the Catholic Church was as important as the necessary criticism of politicians and the republican government.
An important figure in this type of criticism was Isabel Cerruti, an Italian-Brazilian anarchist activist. It is known, thanks to the research of Samantha Colhado Mendes, that Cerruti, signing her texts as Iza Rutt, stated that “what the priests did was deceive the workers and make them trust that the solution to their suffering life of long working hours and low wages was in Christianity”. In this way, Isabel Cerruti denounced the posture of obedience imposed by the Catholic Church under the pretext of reaching the kingdom of heaven while there was no encouragement by the same Church for the daily struggle against exploitation.
Another important name in the anarchist anticlerical stance was Maria Lacerda de Moura, who was born in Minas Gerais and died in 1945 in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Sociologist Miriam Moreira Leite tells us that Maria Lacerda wrote: “[…] married, single or widowed, women are slaves to their wages, their father, their husband, their boss, their spiritual director or society.”
Still according to the feminist perspective of the writer and anarchist:
Until we think, we will try in vain to break the chains of our individual independence; women are slaves; dependent on their salaries, on men, on their capital. Liberation is impossible. Their brains were considered childish by the masculine egoism of their ancestors. […] The ardent, proud, intelligent, idealistic, generous Brazilian woman, in a final impulse, through the flashes of her dormant conscience, will realize. And her eloquent dedication will complete the magnificent work. We lack schools. We lack educators in the broadest sense of the word. To make them be born from this same people – that is what is needed.
In this sense, for Maria Lacerda de Moura, the anticlerical initiative, combined with rational and scientific education, for both men and women, was, par excellence, the main instrument for freedom. The writer denounced that the school model of the time was the great enemy in the construction of a free civilization. Thus, it was largely responsible for perpetuating female slavery. Therefore, female education and the intellectual emancipation of women were as important as political emancipation for total liberation and the construction of true autonomy. Regarding the white and bourgeois feminism of the time, she makes the following diagnosis:
I have come to the conclusion that the way forward is to join forces, not for women to unite to defend their rights, which they confuse with old-fashioned and reactionary complicity. When they talk about rights, all they think about is voting, which should have been demanded a hundred years ago… Now, we no longer need votes, but rather to overthrow the hypocritical, rotten system of parliamentary representations chosen by the people’s pseudo-representatives, under the lying guise of suffrage, a sham like all the shams of our governmental systems, a superstition like so many other archaic superstitions.
Concluding this comment, it is important to reiterate that it is possible to observe, through the experiences and writings of the beginning of the 20th century, in Brazil, that the perspective of anarchist women, while involved in an ethical political-revolutionary project, starts from a certain concrete reality, a reality that crosses the issues of class, race and gender.
Therefore, this perspective emphasizes the constitutive nature of feminism and feminism in libertarian socialism. Therefore, today, through this libertarian conception, it is understood that it is not enough in a political organization to simply establish a physical space for women—a “Women’s Secretariat” or something of the sort. The exchange of knowledge and experiences between male and female workers must be valued as a daily practice, that is, as a principle for total emancipation and liberation. Otherwise, the traditional duality between body and thought is only reinforced, in which men are exclusively given the place of thought and women are given the place of the body – a body to be admired, treated as an accessory, as a thing and allocated in a physical space. This discrimination thus sustains the belief that women are incapable of thinking rationally, condemning them, even in their presence, to be absent from everyday life. This perspective maintains the logic and place of domination in which one exists over the other and not with the other, nor as the other in their differences.
The analysis of the current situation forged by anarchists, always based on the understanding of the practice of principles – such as self-organization, direct action, anticlerical, anti-capitalist, anti-racist stance, and mutual support and class solidarity – allows the construction of a revolutionary project capable of realizing a life under the perspective of libertarian socialism. Thus, it is through the specific condition of the working woman as a structure in the relationship of domination, but also as a structuring factor of the revolutionary process, that the anarchist feminist perspective is sustained, above all committed to not distancing workers from the revolution and individual and collective liberation.
Abridged machine translation.
Top photo: The Maria Antônia Soares and Maria Angelina Soares Space, São Paulo. Instagram: @espacoantonia.angelina
