Getting into Trouble: Dishonest Women, Modern Girls, and Women-Men in the Conceptual Language of "Vida Policial", 1925-1927

Abstract

I F ONE WERE TO TAKE at face value the rhetoric of the weekly police journal Vida Policial (Police life), it would seem that women were causing all kinds of trouble in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1920s.1 Prostitutes were wandering far from their zona (the red-light district), while young girls and matrons frolicked shamelessly on public beaches in scandalous attire; middle-class housewives were neglecting their domestic duties, leaving their families vulnerable to infiltration by degenerates, while their modern daughters took on male habits, perverting the ideal of womanhood; and poor girls rejected womanhood al together, escaping their families by disguising themselves as men and taking to the streets. These scenarios were not depicted as trivial or as picturesque signs of the times. Rather, this type of behavior was presented as a threat to society, its repression a police concern of highest priority. In an era marked by social unrest, political conflict, and economic uncertainty (the journal was published between 1925 and 1927), it might seem puzzling that a police journal dedicated the greater part of each issue to