Rio de Janeiro by Ruy Castro

Author:Ruy Castro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2004-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Nair de Teffe and Chiquinha Gonzaga never met, but together they went down in history for having broken Brazilian social protocol. In 1914 this could only have happened in Rio: here, the creme de la creme – who determined what protocol should be – rubbed shoulders with the people who could break it. For the same reason, it’s not surprising that it should have been two women who did it. Not just that, but women of different colour. Nair was blonde with blue eyes, descended from an English family (Dodsworth) on her mother’s side and German (von Hovnholtz) on her father’s. Chiquinha was mulatta, the daughter of a black freedwoman and a well-off white man, an army officer, nephew of the military hero the Duke of Caxias, and with doctors in the family. It was natural and very carioca that this should have been the way of it.

As much as or more than blacks, immigrants and mulattos, women starred in some fascinating revolutions in Rio between 1830 and 1930. While, in the provinces, the average Brazilian woman was condemned to use veils and spend the day at home praying, cariocas were used to going out to look in shop windows, having their dresses made by a professional dressmaker, going to the theatre, sitting in tea shops drinking tea or eating an ice cream, lunching or dining out and being brought back home by a gentleman. They also took advantage of these hundred years to create a women’s press, take part in republican causes, write erotic poetry, infiltrate the ‘male’ professions, found feminist associations and fight for the right to vote – which they got in 1932, four years after their British sisters and thirteen years before the French, Italians and Japanese. They were the first to go out in the street in long trousers, backless and strapless dresses, the latter called ‘tomara-que-caia’ [’oh-let’s-hope-it-falls’]. But they only got there after their grandmothers and great-grandmothers had borne a long sentence – more than 200 years – of confinement and oppression.

It’s possible that, in the Rio of the end of the sixteenth century, when the pioneer white families were still setting up house on the Castelo hill, women had relative freedom within the walls of the city. When it came down from the hill and spread out, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they began to be restricted and ended up being shut inside their houses, with access, if they were lucky, via the window. This was not unique to Brazil – even in Europe, the majority of women lived in the kitchen and the bedroom, called their husband ‘master’ and never appeared if visitors came to the house. What was abnormal here was the severity of this confinement, which lasted until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Women, if possible, were kept illiterate (so as not to read romantic novels or correspond with strangers). They only came out in the street to go to church covered in black mantillas and accompanied by a chaperone.

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