Nísia Floresta: A primeira feminista do Brasil (review)

In her book, Nísia Floresta: A primeira feminista do Brasil, Constância Lima Duarte, begins with a well-constructed essay about the importance of the writings by Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta (Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto, 1810–1885) to the initial Positivist debates regarding the importance of education for future mother-citizens of Brazil. The book also offers selected chapters from Nísia's three major works: Direitos das mulheres e injustiça dos homens (1832), Opúsculo humanitário (1853), and Cintilações de uma alma brasileira (1859). The selections offer a view of the maturation in Nísia's understanding of the philosophical debates of what Lima Duarte calls the "velho mundo" and how these European ideals might be incorporated and altered into the nascent structure of an emerging Brazil.

Direitos das mulheres is an amalgamation of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft , (François) Poulain de la Barre, Olympe de Gouges and Sophie (de la Roche), four women who wrote about citizenship and educational rights for women for women in late eighteenth century England, France and Germany. Here Nísia sees herself a a mediator between an emerging women's movement and Brazilian realities. In Opúsculo humanitário, Nísia reaffirms her earlier beliefs in the differences between feminism in Europe and Brazil and again stresses the importance of the education of women, where she also calls for a radical revolution in order to ensure the advancement of Brazil: "Enquanto pelo velho e novo mundo vai ressoando o brado – emancipação da mulher – nossa débil voz se lavanta, na capital do Império se Santa Cruz, clamando – educai as mulheres!" (2).

Cintilações de uma alma brasileira first appeared in Italian and was only translated into Portuguese in 1997. The work is less well known and falls in between fiction and autobiography where its subject matter deals with the common French practice of sending children out into the country to be breastfed by rural women. By this time, Nísia Floresta has moved to France and the subject is almost entirely French. No mention is made of "amas de leite" in Brazil, although much time is spent reviewing the need for better moral education for the French upper class.

Lima Duarte includes three chapters of the first book, five of the second and one of the third in a selected works format. She also includes a chronology of Nísia Floresta's life, a bibliography of her published works and a truncated version of the extant bibliography of scholarly work about Nísia Floresta. Notable absences include Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares and Peggy Sharpe. My other complaint concerns the lack of references to the eighteenth and nineteenth century women scholars mentioned in the initial essay. To have mentioned them would have given a much broader scope and purpose to the collection of writings that follow and, perhaps help place the evolution of feminist ideas in a more global perspective. While not having nearly the scope and breadth of the other works Lima Duarte has published about Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta, A primeira feminista is a useful tool for students studying the history of Brazilian women's literature.

Curiousily, in 2005 Wilson Martins decided to criticize Nísia Floresta's partial appropriation of Mary Wollstonecraft 's classic text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)("O universo feminino de Nísia Floresta" in Jornal O Globo Online on August 11, 2005)¹. Martins bases his objections to Nísia Floresta on her first book Direitos das mulheres e a injustiça dos homens (1832) by stating that she fully distorted any possibility of understanding Wollstonecraft 's meaning when she pluralizes the noun. Lima Duarte quite rightly considers Floresta's work as a "livre tradução" or an example of "antropofagia literária" when she demonstrates that Nísia Floresta cited the three French philosophers as well. Martins bases his arguments on the English singular noun "woman" and...