The women's slum: class, race and gender in O cortiço [The Slum], by Aluísio Azevedo, and in its contemporary newspapers (1888-1891)

Abstract

This paper studies literary and journalistic sources and focuses on newspapers which circulated in Rio de Janeiro in 1890, the same year of the publication of the novel O Cortiço [The Slum] by Aluísio Azevedo. Through a cross-analysis on a series of newspapers concerning the “main media” or the “commercial media”, I verified the stances, generally written by white man, on stories of crimes involving washerwomen. Throughout the research it was important to observe the titles of the news as well as the use of literary artifice to build the journalistic narratives. As a result, it was possible to perceive that, despite an insistence in portraying those women according to features associated to the danger they supposedly carried, the polyphonic perspectives of the press prevailed. In conjunction with this analysis, Aluísio Azevedo’s novel afforded evidence on how the public could access narratives which perceived the lives and experiences of poor working women who were also workers, migrants, and descendants of enslaved people. Even when the diffusion of positive perspectives on those women did not seem the final goal of the men of letters, these were woman who fought for what they considered as rights, such as stability of work, family, and housing.