Women’s History in Brazil: Production and Perspectives

Abstract

As an interdisciplinary field and, most of all, as a fluid area of knowledge, women’s studies has had some difficulties in finding a place at Brazilian universities. The existing academic structure is too conservative to abandon certain old courses and replace them by new ones. Only very recently the University of Sāo Paulo has accepted the idea of a Women’s Studies Centre, but this is simply an auxiliary centre that tries to bring together scholars who share this common interest. The initiative was taken by female sociologists and very little has as yet been done at this Centre by historians. We have reason to complain about sociological imperialism. Let me give an example. This last June a conference on ‘Society, Politics, and Social Relations of Gender’ took place and no historian was invited to speak — only sociologists, political scientists, one anthropologist and one psychologist. Even the journal published this year with a first issue on ‘Social Relations of Gender and Relations of Sex’ gave little space to historians; it contained just one article on a women’s periodical in Greece in the late nineteenth century.1