labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janvier / juin 2015 -janeiro/juin 2015

Martha de Hollanda and the Brazilian Feminist Crusade (1928-1932):

an “inflammatory feminist” in Pernambuco?

Alcileide Cabral

Abstract

This article investigates the importance of Martha de Hollanda and of the Brazilian Feminist Crusade, created in 1931, when a new political culture emerged, in which feminists fight for political rights and debate gender inequality in Pernambuco, between the years of 1927 and 1932. Martha de Hollanda was the first feminist in Pernambuco to plead judicially the inclusion of her name in the voter registration in her home city of Vitória de Santo Antão, in 1928. In the articles she published in the local and the national press she made use of her learning to establish a dialogue with different thinkers. As a leader of the crusade, her writings, her presence, her attitudes and speech were a source of discomfort to men and women, and she was slandered. As the parrhesiast she was, she was the occasion of scandal, she smiled and suffered. She appears to have been, in this sense, the “inflammatory feminist” she called herself one day, for a city of women and men who were too chauvinistic and misogynist.

Key words:  Martha de Hollanda; Brazilian Feminist Crusade; Political Culture; Citizenship.

            This paper aims at breaking with the linear narratives on the feminist movement, that, in using the metaphor of “waves”, place the primacy of the feminist struggle in the “enlightened” centers (Europe and The United States) where everything is supposed to have begun, and, in Brasil, tend to place the pioneering fights in the southeast of the country, having reached the rest of the country only later. It is my understanding that we need to look anew to the women who were in several regions of Brasil, feminists or not, who were trail blazers in spaces that were clearly masculine preserves, who questioned the truths about their sex, their bodies, their intelligences in different ways, the written word among others, in publishing controversial articles, under pen names or not. We should not lose sight of the subversive potential of these women and of feminist action, giving a new sense to what it means to be a woman. It is in this scenario of struggle and of different clashes that we watch the emergence of Martha de Hollanda and the Brazilian Feminist Crusade in the land of Pernambuco.

            The first decades of the republican regime in Brasil were decisive in the movement of women, whether feminists or not, who actively participated in the press (Nascimento and Luz, 2012:126-149), forming organizations with a political character, such as the Feminine Republican Party, led by Leolinda Daltro and Gilka Machado, in Rio de Janeiro in 1910, at a time when women were not even considered to be citizens (Pinto, 2003:18-19). Women intruded upon the public space, breaking limits and expanding the boundaries forbidden till then to their gender. As Hebe Mattos notices, the Republic watched the emergence of a political culture in which manifestations in the public space were increasingly central, and that seemed to bring the political presence of the people in the streets as a new and definitive character in the political scene, made up of the middle classes and the urban working classes (2012:92) and, it should be said, with the active presence of middle class women and the women of the urban working classes. Another example of these movements is the League for the Feminine Intellectual Emancipation of Women, organized by Bertha Lutz in 1919 (Soihet, 2006:31).

            Women learned how to move in this scenario. Despite not having the right to vote, they discussed and made politics. They fought for the recognition of their rights, leaving the conditions of inferiority and extreme subjection. They went out into the streets and squares of the city, as in the march organized by Leolinda Daltro and Gilka Machado in Rio de Janeiro in 1917 (Pinto,2003: 18-19). They were present in the visual arts, in dance and in the theaters, as Anita Malfati and Eros Volúsia (Silva, 2007). They invented their bodies anew, as the flappers, that innovated in wearing their hair short, putting on expressive make-up, their skirts above their knees and their legs shaved. (Nascimento and Melo, 2014). They were out in the streets to work, to flirt, for leisure and for art. They breathed boldly the urban culture, despite the old tired ditties against this modern woman.

            They went on strike in the factories and occupied the streets with denunciations and claims for the improvement of working conditions. According to the petition of the Federação Brasileira para o Progresso Feminino ( The Brazilian Federation for the Progress of Women), sent in 1927 to the Federal Senate, “the 1920 Census showed over a million women in trades and professions”. (Schumaher and Brazil, 2000:220) The vote should therefore be not a privilege, nor a reward “to be given to citizens highly specialized for its exercise. It is a duty of all.” But, as is known, the Republic was not for all women and men, nor belonged to all men and women. It had been taken by political groups that took their turns in power, between the states of São Paulo and Minas, supported by part of the oligarchies of the states.

            Thus it was that the military and civilian movement of 1930, in breaking with the oligarchic pact of the “coffee and milk” Republic, permitted the new demands connected to political and civil rights. The new citizenship and imperious need for a political reform were passionately and urgently argued and women made a strategic use of the press to form and advance opinions on their rights, denied up to then.

            In Pernambuco, the first years of the thirties see the birth – nearly simultaneous – of two movements organized for women’s rights: the Brazilian Feminist Crusade, under the leadership of Martha de Hollanda, and the Pernambuco Federation for the Progress of Women, with Edwiges de Sá Pereira at its helm (Nascimento, 2013). Both of them were in contact with Bertha Lutz in Rio de Janeiro, as can be seen in the correspondence with the Brazilian Federation for the Progress of Women.

            Bertha Lutz corresponded with the feminists of Pernambuco between the years of 1927 and 1928 until she decided for the open support to Edwiges de Sá, in 1931, when the initiative of opening in Pernambuco an association of women as a branch of the one in Rio de Janeiro is realized. This political definition of the Rio de Janeiro feminist does not, however, inhibit the young Martha de Hollanda, that creates, in 1931, the Brazilian Feminist Crusade: an institution aiming at a reach as long as that of the Brazilian Federation for the Progress of Women, with its head offices in Rio de Janeiro and led by Bertha Lutz. But where did this young feminist, Martha de Hollanda, calling herself ‘inflamatory’, really come from?

Martha de Hollanda: an inflamatory feminist?

            Martha de Hollanda was born in Vitória[1], in the interior of the state of Pernambuco, at home, as was usual, on the 20^th of March of 1903. She was the daughter of Nestor de Hollanda Cavalcanti, a pharmacist, and of Dona Mathilde Hollanda Cavalcanti (notary public, Vitória, the 6^th of July of 1928)[2]. The Hollanda Cavalcanti were an important family that “enjoyed the honors of being intelligent, vain of their poets” (Hollanda, no date), with a long intellectual and political tradition in the city. Vitória is in the forest in the south of the state, some 51 kilometers from the capital, and lived, in the first years of the century, of the cultivation of sugar cane, cotton and grains.

            The city was a farming city, restless at the time of carnival, home to many clubs (The Lidador. Vitória, February 26, 1927.p. 1), but a conservative one towards the feminine fashion of short hair, as “putting on show the backs of women in an absurd manner”, from the point of view of one newspaper writer (O Lidador, Vitória, June 19^th 1926, p.1). Other dangerous novelties were the modern dances, such as the “tango, the foxtrot, the shimmy that constitute the delight of the present day youth, reflecting (ed) in their attitude the unquiet and tormented soul of the times”. (O Lidador. Vitória, April 14, 1928.p.4). It was even in their plans the creation of a League of “moral and hygiene” against the kiss, considered “the worse of public calamities, worse than alcohol, worse than gambling, worse than the yellow fever. It was the intention of the League to fight the diseases transmitted by the kiss, such as  the “germs”, “the consumption”, “the flu” and even the “syphilis”, and also the preservation of morals and accepted customs of those attending the public places, as the kiss was seen as “the door into sin” and into human depravity.

            There were many problems in the city, as misery and beggary (O Lidador. Vitória, April 14 1928:1). Sanitation did not exist. Public lighting and transportation were precarious. Diseases such as malaria and hookworm disease and other helminthic diseases were still the cause of many victims among the poorer portion of the population (Gazeta de Vitória. Vitória, November 5, 1921, p.3). It was in this provincial farming city, marked by secular and religious feasts, by the struggle between the modern and the traditional, by serious social problems and the lack of investment in public sanitation policies, that was born and raised the girl Martha de Hollanda, the oldest of the couple’s three children.

            According to her autobiographical notes, from the perspective of the writing of the self (Gomes, 2004:7-24), Martha soon left for the capital, to learn how to read and write and to study, at the Colégio Santa Margarida, a catholic school, where she graduated as a teacher in 1925, at 22 years of age, getting then the preparatory of humanities in the Ginásio Pernambucano. She liked to write and was noticed by the masters  (Freitas, 2203:72). She was an avid reader. Her favorite authors were Albertina Bertha and George Sand according to her biographer (Ibid.). Other authors, men and women, were the object of her admiration, Schopenhauer, Flaubert, Dumas, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Eça de Queiroz, Gilka Machado and Machado de Assis among them.

            Some men referred to “her killing eyes” (ibid) and to her “long, dreamy hair”, as said by Joaquim Inojosa (Apud Inojosa, 1984:39). What is then meant by these adjectives? Are they a positive qualification or do they denigrate the image of the feminist? An open and frank look was to have killing eyes? Whom did she kill? The men who devoured her with looks of desire and covetousness? What look was that that was enough to kill? Did she kill with desire those who came near her? It is thus that some men end up constructing an image of Martha as a femme fatale, and so, dangerous.

            Hair long, well combed and fastened, were the symbols of a well-behaved femininity, as explains Michelle Perrot (2007). The young feminist mocks and plays with her hair, with rebellious, uncommon hairdos. She wears her hair short, flapper fashion, leaving the nape and back in view, the symbols of a new sensuousness and eroticization of the female body. Hair worn loose, free from fasteners and creams, in their natural rebelliousness, in its sensuous animality, earns the oneiric form of “dreamy”. Cutting them breaks the heavy chains of her domestication. Her rebelliousness was written in her body, the tokens of her political and intellectual emancipation (Perrot, 2007:59). Little by little, to the shock of her catholic family, de-christianizing her body, freeing it from customs, rules and tradition. This face of hers, framed in short hair, pointed to a new femininity and tended to blur the boundaries between the masculine and the feminine, above all when she sometimes dressed as a man, in a performing act, ending up by destabilizing the fixed and naturalizing gender identities (Butler, 2008:211). She went around in a well-cut jacket, tie and a cane (Freitas, 2003:63) and so could attend and enjoy spaces closed to her sex. Cross-dressed as a man she could ironize and mock the absurdity of forbidding women to go to bars, to walk the streets alone, as well as to enjoy new powers and widen the possibilities of entering spaces prohibited, open to men only.

            She was daring in her clothes. She was a maker of fashion. Extravagant clothes, strong colors, necklines ahead of her time (it was said that the neckline of her blouse ended when it met the skirt), tailored clothes and heavy make-up. Her body seemed to announce the heterotopias of modern times in contrast to the chaste, dull and silenced body of Christianity. She shaved her legs and armpits, and made a point of showing everybody at a moment when shaving with safety razors and creams was beginning to be talked as the ideal of beauty and cleanliness, the expression of the new modern habits (Melo,2015:117).

            She seemed, when still very young, to have a taste for a life that was beautiful, talkative and with an aesthetical attitude. She enjoyed carnival by taste and tradition. She had wild fun in the Abanadores Club, in the Lion. She dressed in a Pierrot costume (Freitas, 2003:63). She was witty and loved a joke. She smoked and drank whisky, two things forbidden to women, whatever their social or civil condition. She was to some “a ruthless woman”, as said Oscar Brandão (Apud Inojosa, 1984:47). A woman who was sensual, modern, extravagant, sincere and outside the rules. Fascination, fear and rejection seem to mark the way her contemporaries see her.

            It was with such a boldness that she pleaded judicially that her name be included in the list of voters of her home town of Vitória de Santo Antão, in 1928. The previous year the president of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, Juvenal Lamartine, had conceded to women the right of the vote and of being elected (A Província, Recife, November 6, 1927:1; A Província, Recife, November 10, 1927:5; A Província, Recife, November 20, 1927.p.1). The shock of this news reaches the whole country. This is the atmosphere in which Martha, 24 years of age, goes to court, becoming the first woman in the state of Pernambuco to fight judicially for this right (O Lidador, july 14, 1928:4).

            In the petition addressed to the Judge of the County of Vitória de Santo Antão, she argues that, if the Brazilian Constitution of 24^th of February 0f 1891 asserts that “all are equal before the law (art. 72, § 2), and since women had not been nominally cited in article  70, that listed those ineligible, it was her understanding that at no moment the Supreme Law discriminates against a woman who is literate and of age, withholding political rights. There was, moreover, the understanding of many judges in the country, as the feminist notes, that the right of women is clear and perfectly right. She brings her argument to an end concluding that, if women cooperate with their activity of public administration, in the exercise of positions in the bureaucracy, belonging to charities, in the education of those in charge of the destiny of the nation, in commerce, in the industries, paying their taxes according to the tax laws of the country, how then could she not directly intervene in the political ruling of the country? (PETITION of Martha de Hollanda Cavalcanti to the Judge of the County of Vitória de Santo Antão. Vitória, July 14, 1928:4). Her struggle does not happen in isolation, nor is it provincial. It happens in the context of the debate on the emancipation of women and the efforts promoted by several feminist movements in Brasil that seek to constitute strategically women as legal subjects in a democratic regime, splitting oligarchic liberalism and widening the narrow conception of citizenship in questioning the sexist political principles that authorized inequality between men and women.

            The request was granted by Judge Felinto Ferreira de Albuquerque. It was his understanding that the Constitution made no gender distinctions, that it bestowed the quality of citizens to individuals declared to be Brazilians, over 21 years of age and that had no incapacity against them, such as expressed in § 2 of art. 70 of said Constitution. If the Supreme Law of the country did not discriminate men and women, he did not dispose of this power. He adds, moreover, in his ruling, that such dispositions were consolidated in the rules of electoral listing referred to in decree number 17.572, of the 10^th of November of 1926. He thus understood the petitioner Martha de Hollanda Cavalcanti presented all the qualifications of capacity demanded by electoral law. He finishes by ordering that her name be included in the listing of voters of the municipality (GRANTING of Judge Felinto Ferreira de Albuquerque, of the circuit court of Vitória de Santo Antão, to the petition and to Martha de Hollanda Teixeira de Albuquerque, 12^th of July of 1928. See also: O Lidador. Vitória, 14^th of July of 1928:.4).

            Martha de Hollanda was in the news (Diário Carioca. Rio de Janeiro, 19^th of July 1928:.3). She received a large number of public congratulations: from Bertha Lutz, the president of the Brazilian Federation for the Progress of Women (O Lidador. Vitória, the 4^th of August of 1928.p.3), from the Women’s Electoral Association of the city of Natal (idem), from the Associate Justice José de Goes Cavalcanti (O Lidador. Vitória, 25^th of July of 1928:4), a cousin of hers. In a certain manner, the attitude of Martha came across as an example and an incentive for other women of Pernambuco, women of different ages, single and married, who went to court in an impulse of courage and multiple confrontations for their rights as citizens. But the conquest of Martha de Hollanda was temporary. The committee for Electoral Revision dismissed the petition (O Lidador. Vitória, 11^th of August 1928?.2).

Martha de Hollanda: a feminist parrhesiast…

            Martha de Hollanda is a parrhesiast in the sense discussed by Foucault in The Courage of Truth (2011): somebody able to tell the truth even when running a risk. Who questions the rulers from her position as a citizen. Who questions the regime of truth on gender. Who states, fearlessly, that “women are in nothing inferior, not in moral, not in the intellect, not in activity, not in energy” (Diário de Pernambuco, Recife, the 15^th of January, 1931.p.3). If Brasil was undergoing a time of changes, a reform of the administrative system, in habits and in customs, “in reforming everything, we cannot avoid reforming the rough belief in our fragility and our intellective lack of wisdom (Idem). She considers the republican regime not only unfair towards women, but hateful. She makes use of freedom to speak freely. She approaches the moral duty of speaking for herself and for other women. This is the sense in which she understands that a woman raises her children, preparing the men of the future. She is active in the factories and in commercial establishments. She teaches. She cultivates the land. She administers. She is employed in office jobs. She pays her taxes and is subject to the civil and criminal laws that are not limited to men alone. The thing she doesn’t have is the right to vote, to intervene, with her intelligence, her care, her judgment, in the destiny of the country, and such a thing is an absurd, as it is not equal and is not fair (idem).

            This is a feminism that aimed to go beyond the vote, in the name of a new feminine identity. It wishes for a new equality between the genders. An emancipating equality founded on education, on the ballast of citizenship and the autonomy of all women, independently of her “civil status or wealth” (idem). Her words still: “a feminism that educates, protects builds, accomplishes, defends” (A Notícia. Recife, 11^th of November 1931.p.1). There is no subterfuge in her discourse. The confrontation is clear. She wishes for different gender relationships, and between the genders. She breaks with the naturalization of the fragility and intellectual inferiority of women. There is a clash with the misogynist and male chauvinist society  in her regime of truth on the sexes. Her discourse and her body publicize the shift in the social conventions. 

            The Brazilian Feminist Crusade she led was the flaming torch to face the debate on political rights and to propagate the body of ideas of female emancipation, in the attempt to build the female legal subject. A moment of the feminist struggle where the foundations were laid of an idea of a female identity with a modern face was the mainspring for the discursive strategies of the struggle. How to tell women that they were as capable as men of going into public life? How to convince them of their worth? How to change the subjectivities based on submission, on inferiority, on emotionalism, on the lack of capacity for reason? This was not an easy enterprise.

            The crusade she led did not have the national reach she would have liked. It is not even possible to speak of an expressive performance within the state. But her campaign for donation to widows at the end of 1931 made her visible in the local press and sometimes in newspapers in other capitals, as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. She counted from the beginning with friendships, a fertile meeting ground among the young feminists and a base for this social network. Friendship was the bond that united Martha, Heloísa, Auri, Celeste, Juracy and Antonia among others, talented writers and poets, some of them pharmacists, some teachers, all of them graduates of the Normal School. Unlike the literary gatherings that also took place in her house - for the organization had no place of its own - in these meetings was served coffee, tea and cakes and there were many debates aimed at organizing the strategies for the public visibility of their demands.

            The “inflammatory companion” as she called herself in a letter to Bertha Lutz, in 1928 (Letter from Martha de Hollanda to Carmem Portinho, secretary to the Brazilian Federation for the Progress of Women. Vitória, 29^th of July 1928. Fundo FBPF. ADM, COR. 1928:147. National Archives), took a public position in favor of divorce, at the time an explosive subject, similar to what abortion is nowadays. She paid dearly for the personal and political frankness on this subject, for the way she dressed herself, too daring for the times, for the literary gatherings and parties she gave, with her husband, in the Lima Street, by this time in Recife already, for the intelligentsia, men mostly, for the literary and political conversations, fueled by whisky, liqueurs, and the choice foods of which her biographer speaks. She wove for herself a aesthetic of life. She promoted meetings in which she nursed politics with poetry and literature, though without the participation of her feminist companions. In 1930 she published The Delirium of the Nothing, a book that made her name known in Brasil and abroad. She became known and badmouthed. Praised and feared.

            In articles published in the local and the national press she made use of her learning from her vast trove of readings and dialogues with different thinkers. She was not always well regarded. Her writings, her attitudes and what she said bothered men and women, who defamed her. As the parrhesiast she was, she was a scandal for the society of the time, and unleashed her laughter and her irony against hypocrisy and so suffered with the defamation of her name. This was the sense in which she seems to have really been the “inflammatory feminist” she one day called herself, for a city of men and women that misogynous. She defended the equality between men and women, while recognizing the crossroads of the difficult and complex difference. She let her imagination go in poetry and, in referring to honor, wrote: “do not lend your garments to hypocrisy” (Hollanda, 1930:18). And against hypocrisy she drove in the nail of her truth

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Biography

Alcileide Cabral, historian, is a professor of the undergraduate and post-graduation course in History in the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco. She has published The Fate of Foundlings: the war of infanticide and the institutionalization of assistance to the abandoned children of Recife (1789-1832), Annablume, 2008. She took, in 2010, her post-doctorate in Unicamp and published the article The Streetcar of Desire. The Feminist Movement in Recife and the debate on sexism (1927-1931) in the magazine Revista Estudos Feministas, in 2013. She has published articles on the abandonment of children in Recife, the practice of infanticide, on maternity and the feminist movements in Recife.