Rev. Educação e Fronteiras, Dourados, v. 13, n. 00, e023024, 2023. e-ISSN:2237-258X
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30612/eduf.v13i00.16928 12
Despite its short lifespan, this small but determined group of ladies occupies
a very advantageous place in the gallery of glories of our homeland, imposing
itself on the admiration and public consciousness of Pernambuco as an
unmistakable necessity and, we dare say, a sine qua non noncondition for the
abolitionist movement in Brazil (“Aos escravos”, AVE LIBERTAS,
September 8, 1885, Recife apud FERREIRA; ALVES; FONTES, 1999, p.
211, our translation).
The newspaper produced by the women themselves, who referred to themselves as the
“Prometheus Modernas”(Modern Prometheus), aimed to "save their enslaved brothers," as
stated in an article by Adelaide Porto: "I am an abolitionist, and I will never bow my head before
the petty interest that brought us the enslavement of our brothers" (AVE LIBERTAS apud
FERREIRA; ALVES; FONTES, 1999, p. 215, our translation).
When we discuss women as publishers, we are referring to literate women for whom the
debate about education was essential, as women needed to be literate before they could make
themselves present in newspapers. Although it was known that they should have this type of
competence, the communities of readers and reading traditions would vary according to society.
According to Chartier (1999, p. 13, our translation), "texts can be read, and read differently by
readers who do not have the same intellectual tools, and who do not maintain the same relationship
with the written word." It was understood that there was difficulty in finding these spaces of female
action, given the silence of the archives, as Perrot (2005) asserts, the "gaze of men upon men" leads
to the forgetting of women's interests, with the male gaze persisting in the debates (SILVA, 2020,
p. 64-65).
These women made the abolitionist cause the path to their emancipation. They appealed
to the notion of progress and insisted on the precepts that came from the age of rights and were
exposed to the world by the French Revolution. Thus, D. Ernestina Bastos expressed herself in
Ave Libertas in 1885: "We will liberate the homeland or die in the struggle, embracing the flag
of abolition, which is the flag of progress and civilization [...] Let us be the martyrs of the
present to be the heroines of the future" (“Aos escravos”, AVE LIBERTAS apud FERREIRA;
ALVES; FONTES, 1999, p. 212, our translation).
Thus, these voices that shared the ideals of the French revolutionaries, well known in the
Brazilian atmosphere throughout the 19th century, claimed for women another status, that of
subjects of their own emancipation, confirming, along with the political principles declared by
the French in 1789, freedom and equality, the arguments for the first feminist struggles.
At the end of the 19th century, in the first meeting of the Sociedade Emancipadora
Parahybana, on March 25, 1883, France was referred to as the homeland of liberty, as per the