Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914-1940.

In recent years researchers have examined topics in Latin American women's history, although much remains to be done. Regarding Brazil, for example, June Hahner and Branca Moreira Alves have traced its feminist movements to 1940. The history of constructions of masculinity and femininity, and of men's and women's roles, in Latin America is an even newer and less explored field. Donna Guy has written on prostitution and sexuality in Buenos Aires; Steve Stern on gender in late colonial Mexico; and Joel Wolfe on male and female workers in Sao Paulo. Concentrating on women, Susan Besse's fine study joins these pioneering full-length works.

Besse centers on the years 1914 to 1940, when a wide variety of spokespersons debated gender norms in Brazil. Certain socioeconomic changes laid the groundwork for and helped propel this public discussion. One was the expansion of the urban industrial economy, particularly after 1930. This development, in turn, gave rise to an urban proletariat and greater economic opportunities for women outside the home, especially for more privileged women; it had already been customary for lower-class women to seek wage labor. Feminists demanded the vote and other rights for women. New clothing fashions, advances in technology, and Hollywood movies undermined the sexual mores that formerly characterized the wealthier sectors, as well as rigid gender distinctions. These alterations prompted anxiety among some quarters. Fearful of instability, many policymakers, intellectuals, and churchmen wanted economic development to continue, yet they also wanted to preserve the social hierarchy, which changes in women's lives appeared to endanger. These changes also seemed to symbolize other threats such as the one posed by militant workers. Thus, eugenically minded reformers sought to further modernize yet stabilize Brazil by buttressing the family - and, within it, women's roles as mothers. While opposed to the eugenicists' naturalistic mindset, newly mobilized Catholics agreed with many of their prescriptions for the family and women. Melding some of the views of reformers and Catholics, President Getulio Vargas's (1930-45, 1950-4) program of centralization, corporatism, and industrialization included state controls over women and the family. Bucking the tide, some women (and a few men) pushed for greater female autonomy, while others echoed the concerns voiced by male conservatives.

The modernizers infused new meaning - and greater responsibility - into older roles that middle- and upper-class women had occupied. They thought that science justified women's domesticity. For eugenicists, national advancement required healthy children, and thus women's childcare duties gained importance. With Brazil's future resting on their shoulders, women's obligations as conscientious, scientific mothers seemed more momentous and onerous than those exercised in the past. Moreover, women were more likely to feel guilty if they believed they could not meet the new higher standards. As prudent housekeepers, consumers, caretakers of youth and the poor, and comforters of men, women would help cement the emerging bourgeois capitalist order. Opinion makers assigned women most of the responsibility for bettering marital life, also deemed essential for national stability and progress. Statesmen and pundits paid much attention to women as mothers and wives but relatively little to men as husbands and even less to men as fathers. Such scrutiny would call too much male behavior into question.

The lot of some women improved in this period. They attained greater access to higher education and the professions, although they still met enormous obstacles. Much of the emphasis in the schools was toward preparing better mothers, however, and there was no interest in training boys to be better fathers. Society accepted the work of middle- and upper-class women somewhat more readily than before (although not the labors of lower-class women), but believed women should give up their jobs if they married wealthy men. Lawmakers passed legislation designed to protect working women and mothers, although the state rarely enforced it. Few jobs for women paid well or were fulfilling. Male controls over women within marriage loosened somewhat, and writers advised men to show more concern for their wives' conjugal happiness. Yet the goal was not to increase female independence but to strengthen the family, and through it the social order, by reducing the potential for conflict. Moreover, men in effect ceded some of their powers over women to the state. Symbolic, perhaps, of women's experience was the suffrage battle. Literate women achieved suffrage in 1932, yet the Estado Novo dictatorship permitted no elections between 1937 and 1945. Interestingly, the main feminist organization, the Federacao Brasileira pelo Progresso Feminino, fought for the vote and a Mother's Day and won both at the same time. Ironically, appeals to motherhood afforded the easiest means for women to attain power and recognition, while at the same time limiting their horizons. Besse concludes that men and women made some modifications in the prevailing gender system, but it remained a highly unequal one, as did the structure of society as a whole.

The treatment ends around 1940, when, according to Besse, concerns about women subsided. By this time, modernizers had lost interest in further change, even of the controlled variety. The Estado Novo had succeeded in clamping down worker unrest, thus reducing fears of instability and of women's possible contributions to it. The feminist victory on the vote may have reduced female calls for reform; at any rate, the repressive climate that prevailed after 1935 was not hospitable to such movements. While Besse's reasons for finishing her narrative at this point are logical, one still wishes that she had covered the rest of Vargas's first presidency in detail. This would have enabled her to treat more fully such matters as the gendered implications of his image as "father of the poor."

The diversity of gender views recorded here is one of the book's many strengths. Regarding feminism, for example, Besse includes not only the liberal suffragist and the more rebellious libertarian brands, but also the Catholic type. Yet in one place she limits her treatment. Besse points out that right-wing (male) Catholicism and Integralism were the greatest dangers to feminism. Her discussion of these movements is brief, however, and based on secondary works and a book published by the Integralist leader Plinio Salgado in 1949. Material from Catholic and Integralist publications of the period under study could have enriched her case.

Still, the views she illustrates were not only diverse but complex, and the author highlights the fascinating contradictions. For example, observers began to regard women who did not earn wages as parasites, at the same time complaining that women's work outside the home undermined the family. A conservative women's magazine criticized fashionable clothing as too revealing, but it published ads featuring the new styles.

Significantly, the author challenges a reigning assumption in Latin American women's history. Lynn Stoner and other authors have claimed that Latin American feminists saw their domestic and active public roles as harmonious. Besse notes that this was not necessarily the case for Brazilian women, many of whom in the 1920s expressed anger about men and marriage. She adds that militant feminists throughout Latin America tended to remain single or childless, in comparison to other women of their social rank. Although in public Brazilian feminists may have exalted motherhood, privately they harbored ambivalence. Here and in other places, Besse raises important questions that will spur further research.

Sandra McGee Deutsch University of Texas-El Paso