latin america: brazil

This hitherto unpublished piece was sent to ISIS in October 1977. It comes from a group of Brazilian women exiled in France, and is translated from French by ISIS.

The phenomenon of feminism for Latin American women is very recent, historically speaking, and little understood.

A few years ago we militant Brazilian women were involved in the fight against the dictatorship which has been in power in our country since 1964. We were always incredibly busy: we made it possible for our husbands, friends and comrades to be able to wage the revolutionary struggle. We were the perfect wives/mothers/secretaries - in other words, the infrastructure.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. In the turn of events that followed, we had many failures and were obliged to flee the country, leaving bitter experiences and sometimes even years in prison behind us.

We scattered around the world; some of us went to Chile during the Popular Unity Government and were able to see how Chilean women, in spite of their active political participation were nonetheless manipulated by the Right or the Left. Wherever they were, they always played the supportive role within the different factions of the class struggle, without ever being able to realise the importance of their own specific demands.

After the coup d'etat in Chile in September 1973, we all came to Europe. We were very stimulated by our contact with the French women's liberation movement, and we started to organise ourselves. We studied the theoretical aspects of the position of women from the point of view of "classical" Marxist texts, but our theoretical debates didn't get us very far - and not surprisingly. Whenever feminism was touched upon, the Marxist point of view was presented by a line coming from outside the movement. This line was inadequate for most women, both from the theoretical and the strategic point of view. It does not take into account our specific common oppression or the oppression of women per se, but concentrates on the aspects of this oppression on the proletariat. Our group did, however, go through this process and came to an impasse which led to our breaking up.

So the Circle of Brazilian women was formed in 1975. It was deeply influenced by the European women's liberation movement and by the actions taken in Brazil during International Women's Year. The Circle was made up of women who felt the need to organise themselves outside existing political parties and organisations in exile - women with very different motivations and degrees of feminist consciousness. At the beginning, aim of the Circle was to publicly denounce and make known the exploitation of the majority of women in our country: the double-day of work, our double exploitation by employer and husband, the social conditioning through which we become totally submissive to men, the inability and impossibility to have control over our own bodies, our active role in the reproduction of the labour force.

The first public activities of the Circle were always mixed: activities exclusively for women seemed pointless since we felt our task was also to make men reflect on women's problems and the importance of integrating our specific demands into the revolutionary struggle. In evaluating what we'd done at the end of that year, we found that we had been particularly anxious to prove to the men of the "Brazilian colony" - our husbands and friends with whom we had often taken political action - that we were capable of taking the initiative and affirming ourselves. We were still not concerned with reaching other Brazilian and Latin American women in Paris - women who had had little political experience and who had just started discovering some aspects of their oppression. We hardly paid any attention to our own life experience, to our experiences as women and the creation of new kinds of relationships between us. Our action took place outside rather than inside ourselves. Within this context we organised several public actions to disseminate information about the women's struggle in Brazil, to denounce the Brazilian Government's policy of birth control, to raise active support for Brazilian feminists etc. We existed. People talked about us and we could even speak politically and express ourselves independently.

Nevertheless, we were aware that these meetings, these activities until now had only touched the surface of the specifics of women's oppression and our situation. We began to realise that there was still a great deal to be learnt, both about ourselves and our lives, as well as about the European movement.

We did feel we had evolved during these experiences. We managed to define our role and our limitations. Being Brazilian women far away from our country and thus far from the concrete possibility of taking action within the movement itself, we are now wondering how we can influence the process of liberation of Brazilian women. We are trying to find a way to reconcile our political action with our struggle for personal liberation.

We are still very hesitant about the question of men; we are split between the desire to "give a good impression" and the need to bring out all our resentments which have built up over the years. We are trying to clarify and develop our ideas, and for that we need the support of all the women who have similar experiences to ours, and of women who can help us to become true militant feminists.

A militant from the Circle of Brazilian Women
Paris, France
October 1977

Contact:
Cercle de Femmes Bresiliennes
Chez Neves
29/31 Rue Boussingault
F-75013 Paris
France