Maria Lacerda de Moura

Maria Lacerda de Moura
President of the International Women's Federation
In office 1921–1922
Personal details
Born	(1887-05-16)16 May 1887 Manhuaçu, Brazil
Died	20 March 1945(1945-03-20) (aged 57) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Resting place	Cemitério de São João Batista
Spouse	Carlos Ferreira de Moura (1905-1925)
Domestic partner	André Néblind (1926-1937)
Education	Escola Normal Municipal de Barbacena
Occupation	Teacher, writer
Known for	Individualist anarchism, feminism, anti-fascism

Maria Lacerda de Moura (Manhuaçu, 16 May 1887 - Rio de Janeiro, 20 March 1945) was a Brazilian teacher, writer and anarcha-feminist. The daughter of spiritist and anticlerical parents, she grew up in the city of Barbacena, in the interior of Minas Gerais, where she graduated as a teacher at the Escola Normal Municipal de Barbacena and participated in official efforts to tackle the social issue through national literacy campaigns and educational reforms.

She began to publish crônicas in a local newspaper in 1912 and in 1918 she published her first book, Em torno da educação, made up of crônicas and conferences she gave in Barbacena on the subject of education. From then on, she established contacts with journalists and writers from Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. During this period, she met José Oiticica and came into contact with the refreshing pedagogical ideas of the feminist doctor Maria Montessori and the anarchist pedagogues Paul Robin, Sebastien Faure, and Francesc Ferrer. She moved to São Paulo in 1921, at the age of 34, and there she had contacts with the women's association movement and the labor movement of the time. She even collaborated with the feminist Bertha Lutz and presided over the Women's International Federation. In 1922, she broke with the feminist associative movements, which was fundamentally concerned with women's suffrage, because she understood that the fight for the right to vote answered a very limited part of women's needs. She collaborated assiduously with the labor and progressive press in São Paulo and in 1923 launched the magazine Renascença.

Between 1928 and 1937, she lived in a farming community in Guararema, in the interior of São Paulo, formed by individualist anarchists and Spanish, French, and Italian deserters from World War I. It was the period of her life in which she produced and acted the most, collaborating weekly in the newspaper O Combate, where she established the polemic of greatest impact with the local fascist press; she gave conferences in Uruguay and Argentina, invited by anti-fascist educational institutions; she met Luiz Carlos Prestes, in exile in Buenos Aires; she gave pacifist conferences and triggered the anti-fascist campaign in São Paulo. The Guararema community was disbanded with political repression during the Estado Novo. In 1938, Maria Lacerda moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she worked at Rádio Mayrink Veiga reading horoscopes. She died on 20 March 1945.

Considered one of the pioneers of feminism in Brazil, her work dealt with subjects such as the feminine condition, free love, the right to sexual pleasure, divorce, conscientious motherhood, prostitution, the fight against clericalism, fascism, and militarism, and established a link between the problem of women's emancipation and the struggle for the emancipation of the individual from capitalism. Her positions share many similar aspects with those of later second-wave feminists.

Biography

Early years

Maria Lacerda de Moura was born in 1887, on the Monte Alverne farm, in Manhuaçu, in the province of Minas Gerais. When she was 4 years old, in 1891, she moved with her parents and siblings to the city of Barbacena, where her father got a position as an official in the Orphans' Registry Office, while her mother made confectionery. She began her studies at the boarding school of the city's orphanage and, when she was 12, she enrolled in the Escola Normal Municipal de Barbacena.

Despite the scientism and positivism of the First Republic, the Catholic Church maintained a dominant position over families, public education and politics in Minas Gerais until 1906. Being from a spiritualist and anticlerical family, from a young age, Maria Lacerda faced discrimination by the bishops of Minas Gerais, who were intolerant of Protestants and spiritualists of various tendencies.

Teaching in Barbacena and first writings

She graduated as a teacher from the Escola Normal Municipal de Barbacena in 1904 and, in 1908, she became the director of the Pedagogium. As an educator, Maria Lacerda participated in official efforts to address the social question through national literacy campaigns and educational reforms, participating in the Barbacense Literacy Campaign and in the city's charitable works.

In 1912, she sent her first crônicas to a local newspaper. After their publication, she came into conflict with her relatives, who censored her and asked her for "more moderation". In 1918, she published her first book, Em torno da educação, made up of crônicas and conferences she gave in Barbacena on the subject of education, and established contacts with journalists and writers from Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In this period, she met José Oiticica and came into contact with the refreshing pedagogical ideas of the feminist doctor Maria Montessori and the anarchist pedagogues Paul Robin, Sebastien Faure and Francesc Ferrer.

Still in Barbacena, Maria Lacerda was connected to some feminist associations. From 1918, Maria Lacerda began to express her concern about the feminine condition and ways to transform it. She tried to solve the problem of abandoned minors in Barbacena, arousing the interest of her students for the underprivileged population. She publicised the associative initiatives of some feminist movements that she had heard about in the periodicals of the larger cities. In 1919, she already referred to the suffragist movement abroad and in Rio de Janeiro. Along with her enthusiasm for the defense of women's rights to citizenship, she became interested in studying the feminine condition.

The attention focused on the larger cities, where the periodicals came from, appears in Maria Lacerda de Moura's articles written in Barbacena. While writing or speaking to her students, she frequently disclosed the information that the capitals provided her with. After the publication of Renovação in 1919, she was invited to her first conferences outside her city. In 1920, she spoke at the headquarters of the Minas Gerais Workers Federation (FOM) in Juiz de Fora, and in 1921, she held a conference in the city of Santos. These conferences established the bridges for Maria Lacerda's departure from Barbacena, and her move to São Paulo in 1921.

Contacts with feminism and the labor movement in São Paulo

The move to São Paulo, at the age of 34, inserted her into the women's associative movements, which multiplied and diversified in the 1920s, and put Maria Lacerda in contact with the effervescent workers' movement of the period. In the capital of São Paulo she found a suitable environment for the development of her ideas and educational activities, now outside the official framework of the State. She continued working as a private teacher and journalist, contributing to the workers' press, writing in newspapers like A Plebe on pedagogy and education, and sending articles to independent and progressive newspapers, like O Combate and A Tribuna. She also published, in 1923, the monthly magazine Renaissance, a cultural publication disseminated among progressive sectors and free thinkers.

Members of the Brazilian Federation for Women's Progress.

Still in Barbacena, Maria Lacerda had been attracted to the women's associative movement, in search of a way out of the "parasitic" and "dependent" condition of Brazilian women. When she moved to São Paulo, she was invited to join the feminist biologist Bertha Lutz, with whom she founded the League for the Intellectual Emancipation of Women, a forerunner of the Brazilian Federation for Women's Progress, whose program announced the goal of "channeling all scattered feminine energies towards philosophical, sociological, psychological, ethical and aesthetical culture - for the advent of a better society." In 1922, Maria Lacerda delegated Bertha Lutz to represent her at the International Women's Federation, which she had created with women from São Paulo and Santos, at the Pan-American Women's Conference in Baltimore. Maria Lacerda was president of the International Women's Federation between 1921 and 1922, making a pioneering clause in the organization's statutes: the creation of a course on women's history in all women's schools. In 1922, she distanced herself from the women's associative organizations, which had been fundamentally concerned with women's suffrage, as she came to understand that the struggle for the right to vote answered a very limited portion of women's needs.

From her participation and experience with different women's associative movements, as well as from her experience in communities and cities of different composition and density, Maria Lacerda gathered material and reflected on the different conditions and consequences of women's lives.

Maria Lacerda maintained close ties with the anarchists of São Paulo, especially with the cultural initiatives promoted by them. However, she also established some polemics with libertarian militants, after a conference in August 1923, where she spoke about the educational work of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the then People's Commissar of Education in the Soviet Union. The anarchists, who by that time had broken with the communists, criticized her implicit support for the Soviet Union. However, Maria Lacerda continued to collaborate with the workers' press and was still invited by the anarchists to speak at their conferences. Her collaboration with the libertarians was accentuated again in the 1930s, in the campaign against the war and in the Anti-clerical League.

Without abandoning spiritualism, Maria Lacerda intensified her theosophical convictions in contact with the Santista poet and painter Ângelo Guido, who would later collaborate with her in the five published issues of the magazine Renascença. In charge of the "New Books" section, he was its visual programmer and the cover artist for the first edition of Religião do amor e da beleza, from 1926.

In 1926, she met the Frenchman André Néblind, with whom she collaborated and was under influence of until 1937, and came into contact with the work of Han Ryner, the French individualist anarchist. Han Ryner's work had a great impact on Maria Lacerda, which brought her, in her words, "greater desire for a much higher inner purification," giving her "the highest notion of ethical freedom... free from schools, free from churches, free from dogmas, free from academies, free from crutches, free from governmental, religious and social prejudices."

Experience in Guararema, anti-fascism and intellectual prolificacy

Between 1928 and 1937, Maria Lacerda lived in a farming community in Guararema, in the interior of São Paulo, formed by individualist anarchists and Spanish, French, and Italian deserters from World War I. They desired to live there in freedom and without hierarchies, either between manual and intellectual work or between men and women, refusing the traditional norms of society and exercising an active pacifism by opposing all forms of violence. Maria Lacerda's retreat to Guararema, in an attempt to participate in this agricultural community, corresponded to her greatest period of intellectual productivity, both in number of books, articles and conferences and in their impact.

In Guararema, Maria Lacerda put her rationalist mode of education into practice, together with her companions and their children. She taught these children how to read the French language and speak the Italian language, told them history, read poems, and explained nature and social problems. She also kept a weekly column in O Combate, which united several progressive forces in São Paulo.

In her weekly column in the newspaper O Combate she unleashed, in 1928, a violent polemic with the newspapers of the Italian colony in São Paulo, especially Il Piccolo and Fanfulla. This was a sarcastic and immoderate text regarding the tributes paid by the Brazilian press and clergy to Carlo Del Prete, an Italian aviator who had died in a crash near Natal. Her criticism of the values exalted in the tributes to the dead aviator - "God, fatherland, and family" - was joined by disapproval of the militaristic nature of Prete's trip. There were many protests against her controversial polemic, which provoked rallies and resulted in the jamming of newspapers. A Nota do Dia, Il Piccolo and Fanfulla responded to her "blasphemy" in violent terms, but Maria Lacerda still had the support of O Combate.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, in the face of efforts to revitalize the Catholic Church and the development of fascist groups such as Brazilian Integralist Action, Maria Lacerda redoubled her anticlericalism and engaged tirelessly in antifascist and pacifist activism. Her support for the Anticlerical League brought her to deliver several lectures regarding the achievement of freedom of thought. In view of the news of the foundation of a Brazilian Catholic Party, by the initiative of Sebastião da Silveira Cintra, the National Coalition for a Secular State was mobilized in order to rally the "free thinkers against the strengthening of the reactionary forces of the Church and the State". It was through the Coalition that Maria Lacerda maintained, in the 1930s, her greatest contacts with avowedly anticlerical groups. She held anti-war and anti-fascist conferences in São Paulo, Sorocaba, Campinas, Santos, Rio de Janeiro, and, in 1929, in Uruguay and Argentina, at the invitation of the Italian Antifascist League and the Argentine Anti-imperialist League. In Argentina, she met the Brazilian revolutionary Luís Carlos Prestes, then in exile, and interviewed him for a story in O Combate. In 1934 and 1935, she wrote two anti-fascist books, Clero e fascismo – horda de embrutecedores and Fascismo – filho dilecto da Igreja e do capital. Also in 1935, she broke with the Rosicrucian Order, with which she had some closeness, after learning that its headquarters in Berlin had been ceded to the Nazis, and participated in the Women's Committee Against War.

Although her books Clero e fascismo and Fascismo – filho dilecto da Igreja e do capital were received as a form of anti-fascist action, they also generated polemics among anarchists and communists. In the anarchist bi-weekly A Plebe, it was criticized for its verbosity, theoretical and political inconsistency, inaccuracies and contradictions, and especially for its implicit support for the Soviet Union and state communism, while neglecting the existence of anarchists, except for Jesus Christ. Her pacifism, on the other hand, alienated her from the communists, for whom pacifist propaganda hid within itself "the grave insidiousness of reassuring and paralyzing the revolutionary fighting energies of the proletariat."

With the proclamation of the Estado Novo, police repression soon hit the community of Guararema. There were home invasions, seizure and burning of books, inquiries, denunciations, arrests and deportations. Maria Lacerda remained in hiding in Freguesia da Escada for months and then returned to Barbacena in 1937 to try to restart a life as a preparatory school teacher, living in the old Rua da Morte, where she began her practices and reflections in the occult.

Final years

In 1938, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, already suffering from health problems. Initially settled in Copacabana, she moved to Tijuca and then to Ilha do Governador, in 1942. She sought refuge in spiritualism and made a living by teaching commercial education. The Rio de Janeiro period was marked by her reading horoscopes at Radio Mayrink Veiga, applying her studies of astrology, and by collaborating with the Minas Gerais professor of international commerce, Aníbal Vaz de Melo, who quotes her in Jesus Cristo, o maior dos anarquistas and O evangelho à luz da astrologia. Her last lecture, O silêncio, was given at the Antique Rosicrucian Fraternity in 1944, where she talked about the work of Pythagoras. She died the following year, without seeing the end of World War II. She was buried in the Cemitério de São João Batista, in Rio de Janeiro.

Personal life

In 1905, she married the civil servant Carlos Ferreira de Moura, with whom she remained until 1925 and maintained a great friendship with until the end of her life. She had no children from her marriage, but in 1912, she adopted Jair, a nephew, and Carminda, a needy orphan. In 1935, her adopted son Jair joined Brazilian Integralist Action, which disgusted her. She publicly rebuked him in an open letter published in the periodical A Lanterna, where she declared, "I do not take away your right to be free. But all freedom excludes the right to oppress one's fellow man."

In 1926, she began a relationship with the Frenchman André Néblind, a mentor of the agricultural community of Guararema, who was arrested and deported in 1937.

Thought and work

Maria Lacerda's thought and work has been identified with individualist anarchism, although she denied the label of anarchist, as well as all the others which her contemporaries tried to present her - feminist, reformist, communist and sexologist. While she also refused to participate in political parties or establish programs, she ended up delimiting one, albeit by denial, in 1935:

Abstain from all public functions of an administrative, judicial, military nature; refuse to be a mayor, judge, policeman, official, politician, or executioner. Do not accept functions that could harm others. Refuse to be a banker, business intermediary, exploiter of women, lawyer, or exploiter of workers. Refuse to be a worker for clerical or fascist newspapers. Refuse to be the instrument of iniquities. Sacrifice the body, if necessary - of the number of things indifferent to the stoic - in order not to sacrifice reason, inner freedom, or conscience. Do not denounce, do not judge, do not recognize any idol [...] Do not kill. Active resistance, direct action, the new revolutionary tactic of supreme resistance to evil, non-violence.

The personal relationships she maintained with militants and intellectuals were always established as a function of action, especially in education, in anti-clerical, pacifist and anti-fascist campaigns. Despite early collaboration with feminist suffragists, she became a harsh critic of representative democracy, which, together with anticlericalism and a belief in education as a tool for transforming society, brought her closer to anarchists. For her:

[...] it is no longer votes we need but to overthrow the hypocritical, carceral system of parliamentary representations chosen by the pseudo-representatives of the people under the lying guise of suffrage, a swindle like all the swindles of our governmental systems, a superstition like so many other archaic superstitions.

Maria Lacerda also counterposed self-managed small property, without labor exploitation, to industrialist capitalism - a typical position of individualist anarchism -, aspiring to moneyless exchanges, because she considered financial capital one of the springs of international trade, which financed wars.

She also combined her radical positions with her spiritualist convictions. She considered herself an individualist, adept of "supreme resistance" and non-violence, citing Jesus Christ, Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi.

Her work, in general, is characterized by its doctrinal content, prevailing the oratorical tone of her articles and conferences, making use of a persuasive, pamphleteering and eloquent argumentation. Her conferences, books and articles were all coated with an educational intent, proposing to spread knowledge, in order to emancipate individuals for the exercise of the humanitarian ideal.

Feminism

From her first book, Em torno da educação, published in 1918, Maria Lacerda began to examine the feminine condition. In her subsequent works, she started to divulge the fight for the right to citizenship, to education; the need to resist the reduction of women's life to the role of procreator, the existing prejudices against women writers, the legitimization of women's inferiority in society; the right to love and to marry by free choice, the need for conscious maternity, the problem of the spinster and the prostitute, the situations which create crimes of passion and the forms of domestic work and repercussions of women's salaried work.

Although in her early work she defended the struggle for women's suffrage, she came to understand that the right to vote responded to a very limited portion of women's needs and that it did not represent a path to her own emancipation. According to Maria Lacerda,

What the highly emancipated woman claims, at the present time, is not the simple right to vote - it is much more than that. It is not a political concession, entry into parliament or an administrative post - which, by the way, does not revolutionize the question of female emancipation [...] And, perchance, are not men sacrificed? [...] Emancipate the woman? No, emancipate the human race!

She blamed bourgeois and misogynistic society for female subordination, stating that:

They have mutilated the woman, through prejudices and social conventions: they made her an incomplete and disgraced being in the spinster type and solved the male sexual problem by organizing the market of sexual relations, prostitution, the cabarets and casinos, the houses of tolerance, the resources, the rendez-vous and the caftism.

For Maria Lacerda, in capitalist society the woman is twice a slave, since she would be domesticated by the man and at the same time "a social slave of a society based on money and privileges, maintained by the authority of the state and the armed forces to defend power, dominism and monetary industrialism."

Maria Lacerda also took a radical anticlerical stance in her works on the feminine condition, attributing to the Catholic clergy, through their power within families and, in particular, within schools, the exercise and propagation of the subservient situation of women.

Finally, she contested the idea that women were biologically and morally inferior to men in her book A mulher é uma degenerada?, written in response to the Portuguese physician Miguel Bombarda's A epilepsia e as pseudo-epilepsia, questioning the idea of the cerebral inferiority of women, which was in vogue at the time.

Free love

Maria Lacerda was a critic of bourgeois sexual morality, which she considered repressive and hypocritical, advocating sex education for young people, free love, the right to sexual pleasure, divorce and conscious motherhood. She denounced the "sexual contract" implicit in the social contract, which would require the right to women's bodies and sexual pleasure. According to her, society establishes divisions that are profoundly harmful to human development, since they are based on the slavery of women and the servility of the weak, and, in this sense, monogamous marriage would exclusively benefit men, not women. In Civilização – tronco de escravos, she stated:

Indissoluble monogamy, the legal family's defender of private property, defender of the privileges that constitute our social organization of masters and slaves, of exploiters and exploited is a fraud and, as such, incompatible with individual rights, incompatible with the evolution towards a broader freedom, towards a broader notion of the respect due to the rights of one's fellow man.

She was concerned with the family and prostitution and examined them as complementary social institutions, capable of containing and repressing the freedom of the female body and thought. She fundamentally attributed the implanting and empowering of a "sacred family" and an "unholy family" to the Catholic Church and the state.

In Religião do amor e da beleza, she contested gender hierarchies and proposed a new sexual conduct, in which woman could be elevated on the moral and spiritual planes, asserting that "woman has been body only" and that "the female soul sleeps in the unconsciousness of a millennial involution."

Drawing on the work of the French individualist anarchist Han Ryner, Maria Lacerda thought of a human evolution possible only through plural love. Plural love would suppress crimes of passion, the unworthy lies and concessions of monogamous marriage, it would exterminate prostitution and its economic exploitation. Being able to choose a partner and being able to support herself in the struggle for subsistence, the woman would be free and happy. She sought to differentiate the idea of plural love from that of pluralistic love, advocated by another French individualist anarchist, Émile Armand:

... plural love is always, for both man and woman, the blossoming of freedom, wisdom and individualism. But the loving camaraderie of "L'Ellébore" or your "Fraternity of Love," that contract which spouses an entire group, known and unknown, is infinitely more servile than the banal contract and marriage before a bandaged tricolor womb.

Even though she recognized advances in the fields of education and the status of women in Russia after the Revolution of 1917, she questioned the conception of love of the Russian communist Alexandra Kollontai, leader of the Workers' Opposition, whom she had met through the translation of A nova mulher e a moral sexual, especially with regard to the organization of love life. For Maria Lacerda, "to dream of the domination of a party or an ideology for the whole world and to organize love according to the interests of that party or that class or ideology" would be "to suffocate freedom, to forge and cultivate an unrelenting struggle, to despise the experiences of the past and to preserve indefinitely the same social chaos." According to her, men and women would find "in biological laws and affective and spiritual needs, their path, their truth and their life."

Antifascism

Maria Lacerda prominently engaged in anti-fascist activism, and most frequently expressed opposition to Italian fascism and its violent processes of manipulation and repression, while also expressing repudiation of Brazilian Integralism and German Nazism. The parallel she drew between fascist methods of action and the inquisitorial methods of the counterreformation strengthened her anticlericalism. She saw in fascism a form of concentration of capital, always linked to the tentacular hierarchy of the Catholic clergy. She thus explained its offensive capacity, considering the alliance between Church and State dangerous and sinister. At various times, she tried to sketch the origin of fascism in the repression of needs and impulses by the authoritarian functions of the family and the Church.

In her work Clero e fascismo, she emphasized the tragic and threatening character of Italian fascism. The book is composed of several articles and conferences and discusses various aspects of fascism: its intellectual origin, milestones of its expansion, the contradictions and opportunism in Benito Mussolini's speeches, and the alliance of fascism with the papacy. In Fascismo – filho dilecto da Igreja e do capital, she discusses the Church's instruments of power and repression, trying to show the fascist ideology as an expression of a new Counter-Reformation, capable of creating an inquisition with multiplied resources, to confront the social revolution.

Pacifism

Along with her anti-fascist activism, Maria Lacerda also advocated pacifism. According to her, war would be the inevitable result of fascist politics. Inspired by Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi and Romain Rolland, Maria Lacerda wrote several articles on aspects of war, delivered conferences and signed manifestos calling public attention to its dangers and the need to break the mystique of its inevitability, and denounced the achievements of capitalism and science applied to human extermination. She proposed that women take a decisive role against wars, by refusing direct and indirect services to the preparations and to the combatants and by carrying out a womb strike, preventing the birth of a population that the State would incorporate into its armies. She was a supporter of nonviolent resistance, considering the use of force to resist force a greater evil. Revolutionary violence was considered a method not appropriate for social transformation, since for her, the "social question is precisely the suppression of all violence, of all authority." For her,

The "supreme resistance or non-violence or non-cooperation is the only and last path open to new human destinies. It is "direct action," it is action, and the most potent as the newest of actions, in Romain Rolland's words. It is not passive resignation, it is precisely the attitude of true combat, the combat against previous tyrannies, and the combat of souls, the struggle in the highest field of ideas and human feelings - that humanity is going through the supreme crisis of a fossilized past, of unburied corpses and a luminous possibility, struggling in the midst of the crimes and misdeeds of the entire human race.

In her pacifist activism, Maria Lacerda systematically publicized the forms of opposition to and precipitation of war; conscientious objection; European and American imperialisms in Latin America; the Italian invasion of Ethiopia; the resources of chemistry, physics, and bacteriology applied to what she called the "Armaments International," and the power and interest of international finance in national conflicts.

Education

Maria Lacerda identified herself with those who saw in education a process for modifying society. The doctrine of non-violence, of which she was a supporter, converted education into her process of social struggle. She adopted the discourse and pedagogical practice of the anarchists, which she juxtaposed with the dominant ideology. Her writings were particularly influenced by the rationalist pedagogy of Francesc Ferrer:

A scientific and rational education for both sexes, is the most perfect instrument of freedom. It is the extinction of universal misery, it is the accumulation of wealth, it is the contribution to solidarity - the morality of the future. [...] While the percentage of illiterates is as we know it in all countries, and while education remains what it is and accessible only to a part of humanity, while the proletariat does not take care of its schools, its culture, in a titanic surge against the exploitation of man by man, it is useless to think of social equity because there will always be a smarter faction that will take the reins of government and the privileged places, to the detriment of other higher dreams. What is needed, then, is individual mentality, the notion of responsibility.

She considered "the present school" to be a "reactionary instrument of the conservative and routine past," "enemy of the civilization of freedom and continuer of female slavery." She believed that women's education would stimulate women to social participation, breaking from servility and seclusion.

Recognition and legacy

Throughout her life, Maria Lacerda adopted quite advanced positions, in many aspects similar to those of second-wave feminism, especially with regard to the critique of bourgeois morality and the ideology of domesticity, openly problematizing issues such as sexuality, the exclusion of women from public life, their identification with nature and their confinement in the private sphere. In addition to the many books, articles and pamphlets in which she denounced the multiple forms of bourgeois domination, male oppression and capitalist exploitation of labor, several of her texts were published in anarchist journals of Spain and Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s, among them, Estudios and La Revista Blanca.

With the growing interest in gender studies in Brazil starting in the 1980s, Maria Lacerda de Moura's life and work were rediscovered with the publication of Miriam Moreira Leite's biography in 1984. Since then, several studies on her work have been carried out in different areas of the human sciences. In 2003, the Image and Sound in Anthropology Laboratory of the University of São Paulo made a thirty minute documentary, entitled Maria Lacerda de Moura - Trajetória de uma rebel, and in 2005, an anthology of Maria Lacerda de Moura's writings was published by her biographer Miriam Moreira Leite.

Selected works

• "A fraternidade na escola" (The fraternity at school) (1922)
• "A mulher hodierna e o seu papel na sociedade" (The women nowadays and her role in society) (1923)
• "A mulher é uma degenerada?" (Is the woman a degenerated being?) (1924)
• "Religião do amor e da beleza" (Religion of love and beauty) (1926)
• "Amai-vos e não vos multipliqueis" (Love each other and don't breed) (1931)
• "Han Ryner e o amor no plural" (Han Ryner and the love in plural) (1933)
• Em torno da Educação (Around education)
• Renovação (Renovation)
• Lições da Pedagogia (Lessons from pedagogy) (1925)
• De Amundsen a Del Prete (From Amundsen to Del Prete) (1928)
• Civilização, tronco de escravos (Civilisation, trunk of slaves) (1931)
• Serviço militar obrigatório para a mulher? Recuso-me... (Compulsory military service for women? I refuse...) (1933)
• Clero e Fascismo, horda de embrutecedores (Clergy and Fascism, horde of brutal people) (1933)
• Fascismo – filho dileto da Igreja e do Capital (1933)
• Português para os cursos comerciais (1940)
• O Silêncio (The Silence) (1944)

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• Queluz, Gilson Leandro (October 2011). "Representations of science and technology in Brazilian anarchism: José Oiticica and Maria Lacerda de Moura". Circumscribere: International Journal for the History of Science. 10. Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. ISSN 1980-7651. OCLC 220247548.
• Rago, Margareth (1995). "As mulheres na historiografia brasileira". In Zélia Lopes, Silva (ed.). Cultura Histórica em Debate (in Portuguese). São Paulo: UNESP. pp. 81–91. ISBN 8571390754. OCLC 33664684.
• Rago, Margareth (2007). "Ética, anarquia e revolução em Maria Lacerda de Moura". In Ferreira, Jorge; Reis, Daniel Aarão (eds.). As esquerdas no Brasil (in Portuguese). Vol. 1. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira. pp. 273–293. OCLC 912747775.
• Ramos Flores, Maria Bernardete (2020). "O destino indelével do desejo". Estudos Feministas (in Portuguese). 28 (3): 1–16. doi:10.1590/1806-9584-2020v28n361583. ISSN 1806-9584. JSTOR 26965148. OCLC 9434115769 – via SciELO.
• Soihet, Rachel (2007). "Formas de Violência, Relações de Gênero e Feminismo". In Piscitelli, Adriana; Melo, Hildete Pereira; Maluf, Sônia Weidner; Puga, Vera Lucia (eds.). Olhares Feministas (in Portuguese). Brasília: Ministério da Educação. pp. 369–393.

External links

• Gonçalves, Adelaide; Silva, Jorge. "Maria Lacerda de Moura - Uma Anarquista Individualista Brasileira". Revista Utopia (in Portuguese) (90). OCLC 492661387.
• "Maria Lacerda de Moura, 1887–1944". Singularidades (16). Translated by Sharkey, Paul. November 2000. ISSN 0872-7104. OCLC 942801815.
• Ferraz, Ana Lúcia; Leite, Míriam Moreira (2003). Maria Lacerda de Moura – Trajetória de uma rebelde (Documentary film) (in Portuguese). University of São Paulo.