The antifeminism and the anti-sufragism in publications of illustrated humorous magazines O Malho and Careta (1917-1932)

Abstract

The year 1917 was emblematic in different contexts. It was the moment of the First World War, the emergence of the Bolshevik Revolution, and, in the national context, the General Strike of the workers of industry and commerce. Moreover, the beginning of the twentieth century is the moment of the emergence of Brazilian modernism, a movement that influenced the way in which society came to understand culture, technological changes and republican political transition. The female suffrage, proposed by Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft in the late eighteenth century, gains strength in the voices of the suffragettes and, in the context of the great political tensions, it is one of the main demands of feminist sectors in different countries. The First Feminist Wave was the beginning of the systematic political organization of women demanding fundamental rights hitherto reserved only for specific male sectors. Several opposed positions in public opinion aroused against this movement, which used different languages in order to delegitimize feminist and suffragist claims. The proposal of this research is to analyze those positions, characterized as antifeminists and anti-suffragists, specifically published between 1917 and 1932 in illustrated humorous magazines of great circulation in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Among caricatures, chronicles and articles, some editions of the magazine Careta and O Malho brought the theme of feminism and female suffrage in a satirical way to the readership. We propose, through these sources, to study the humorous discursive mechanisms of the denial of political rights to women as a recurrent phenomenon in that Brazilian historical context. (AU)