Women, BCP and Feminisms: disputes and tensions (1930-1937)

Abstract

This article analyzes the feminist activism of women from Communist Party of Brazil, now called Brazilian Communist Party (BCP) between 1930 and 1937, as well as established relationships with other feminist groups of the period. The central concern is to show how pecebistas conceived the fight
and the criticisms they made to other feminist groups. In the early twentieth
century, it has become a growing number of women organized in support of
political and social change for females. In the period, born formal collective
organizations that fought for more rights for women, we usually call feminists.
The struggle for women’s emancipation was permeated by tensions. For
women the BCP, feminism was understood as a “petty bourgeois” movement,
therefore, inappropriate for women who were truly concerned with women’s
emancipation. Do not recognize herself feminist does not mean, necessarily,
lack of engagement with the common guidelines to feminisms. Aside from all
the tensions, the struggle of women into BCP, and intraparty relations have
also been marked by tensions and contradictions. In this sense, the text aims
to reflect on the different forms of organization, tensions and contradictions
in feminist struggles in the first half of the twentieth century, especially those
connected to the BCP.