Cartas apologéticas that Cracked the Espelho crítico: Gertrudes Margarida de Jesus and Enlightenment Proto-feminism in Portugal

Abstract

IN January of 1761 the Lisbon editorial house Antonio Vicente da Silva published an anonymous work titled Espelho critico, no qual claramente se vem alguns defeitos das mulheres, fabricado na loja da verdade pelo Irmao Amador do Dezengano, que pode servir de estimulo para a reforma dos mesmos Defeitos. (1) The folheto de cordel purported to be a broadside assault on the feminine sex, focusing on the plentiful shameful female attributes. Less than three months later, Dona Gertrudes Margarida de Jesus responded strongly to the accusations of Amador do Dezengano, the pseudonymous author of Espelho critico, with two public letters in folheto that defended the feminine sex against the misogynist. (2) Her Primeira (and subsequently, Segunda) carta apologetica em favor e defensa das mulheres, escrita por Dona Gertrudes Margarida de Jesus, ao Irmao Amador do Dezengano, com a qual destroe toda a fabrica do seu espelho critico, was approved by the Santo Oficio's censors and published on March 4, 1761. In this article, I analyze Jesus's two Cartas in response to Dezengano's Espelho critico not only as a challenge to the unequal educational status quo for women in the period, but more importantly as an early proto-feminist manifesto. As I will demonstrate, her cartas distorted the male gaze in the mirror and provided Portuguese women with a public document that reflected and celebrated their actual and potential intellectual value in Enlightenment Portuguese society. I borrow the term proto-feminism from political scientists Eileen Hunt Botting and Sarah L. Houser, who viewed American philosopher Hannah Mather Crocker's advocacy as a conceptual precursor to modern feminism (265), to explore what historian Karen Offen has called feminist concerns in the European Enlightenment (27), particularly relating to women's education and freedom. Little is known about Jesus's biography except that she was a nun, although she was certainly not the first Portuguese woman to write about her mistreatment by men. Most notably, the much-debated Lettres Portuguaises (Cartas portuguesas), originally attributed to Mariana Alcoforado but perhaps written by the Frenchman Comte de Guilleragues in 1669, decried the mistreatment of a disillusioned Portuguese woman by her French suitor, the Marquis de Chantilly. However, Jesus was unique in that, unlike Alcoforado's traditional epistolary lament, her Cartas stood out as an intellectualized defense of women that counterattacked using the same classical rhetorical tools and sources as the misogynist Dezengano. Moreover, Jesus borrowed the apologia trope, which had a long tradition as a defense or justification (Torres Feijo 226), but instead used it as an advocacy tool to demonstrate women's intellectual capacity, despite not having access to the same formal education as men. To understand better the debate spurred by Espelho critico and the ensuing Cartas, we must also consider the reform-minded socio-historical context of Enlightenment Portugal. Before the Dezengano/Jesus polemic of 1761, enlightened ideas had been slow to arrive in Portugal from Northern Europe. However, beginning with the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which destroyed most of the city's infrastructure, the literal rebuilding of the Portuguese capital made the small, peripheral European country ripe for social and political reforms driven by Enlightenment ideals from abroad. As Estela Vieira argues, in the earthquake's aftermath, [w]hile the epistemological distance turned the catastrophic events into cultural topoi of critical and political relevance, the universal aspirations of Enlightenment discourse eclipsed regional forms of coping and creating (115; original emphasis). Consequently, the destruction and almost complete reconstruction of Portugal sped up European Enlightenment trends in Portuguese society. Without a doubt the most influential figure of the post-earthquake period, even more than King Jose I, was the future Marquas de Pombal, Sebastiao Jose de Carvalho e Melo, King Jose's prime minister, who was named Count of Oeiras in 1759. …