SOME REFLECTIONS ABOUT THE CONDITION OF BRAZILIAN WOMEN FROM COLONY TO THE FIRST DECADES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

This article, about reflections on the condition of Brazilian women from the Colony to the first decades of the twentieth century, reveals the historical position of them and the attitudes and behaviors related to gender and sexuality. Subdued, it was treated as a sexual object, arousing all sorts of misogyny by men. Rebel, veiled or ostensibly, could serve their own desires. Throughout history, the Church and medical institutions which jointly accounted for, significantly, established the meaning and place of women. In Colony period, the woman is a ward from the Catholic ideology, but from the nineteenth century, after Independence, this power control arises to Medicine. The physician submits the religious discourse, naturalizing the status of women as one that breeds, namely the insertion of the medical issues of family scientifically legitimate colonial patriarchy. This is accentuated in the early twentieth century, when medicine consolidated setting standards and rules for marriage, to motherhood and family life. We note how the feminine universe was (and it is nowadays) ambivalent, with "one foot" in virtue and another in sin, with a tendency to contain and another to trespass. On the one hand we have the home and motherhood, validated in marriage, in which the woman is cared for and dependent on her husband. Reflecting on the motherhood of Virgin Mary, comes to the sacred dimension of the idealized woman saint by the Church. At the same time, however, feels the need for freedom, identity and independence, needing to give a voice to the desire to have their sexuality and all that it is due in full. The manifestation of the desire and the call for sexual satisfaction, and put in permanent conflict personal, psychological and social split between moral entrenched across generations and cultural transformations resulting from decades of the 20th Century.