To Brazil of my dreams: feminism and modernism in the utopia of Adalzira Bittencourt

Abstract

This essay articulates Brazilian writer Adalzira Bittencourt's feminism to the modernist movement in Brazil, drawing relationships between her modernist utopia -- which cannot be restricted to concerns about women's power -- and the national dream that projected the nation in the 1920s. It also articulates Bittencourt's brand of feminism -- in line with the Feminine Republican Party's ideology (in the 1920s and 1930s) and under the influence of eugenic laws or hygienic practices -- with the hegemonic discourses emphasizing maternity as women's mission in improving both the race and the nation,.

feminism; modernism; eugenics; nationalism