Purificando corpos e normalizando mentes: mulheres católicas e imprensa no Brasil e em Portugal, 1937-1945

Abstract

Our study "Purifying bodies and standardising minds: Catholic women and press in Brazil and Portugal, 1937-1945" intended to analyze the participation in the written press of the young people who were part of the Sacred Union of the Daughters of Mary and of Portuguese Female Youth during the years from 1937 to 1945, a period that both here in Brazil with in Portugal is commonly called New State. That context was marked by the concentration of power in the hands of dictators Getúlio Dorneles Vargas and António de Oliveira Salazar, respectively, that deeply altered the political, economic, social, cultural and religious spheres in Brazil and Portugal. We believe that the analysis of the performance of women who were part of these two associations interests the History because they defending and propagating conservative structures such as family, homeland and religion, also they did conquer their spaces in the local press. In this research we seek to establish a relationship between the particular (associations) and the general (Politics and society). For this, we prioritize specific documents of the Sacred Union of the Daughters of Mary and of the Portuguese Female Youth, as well as the periodicals produced by them: "Mary: Journal of the Marian Congregations" and "Portuguese Female Youth's Monthly Bulletin"; which were analyzed from methodological procedures proposed by the historian Tania Regina de Luca. As a theoretical reference, we adopted the concepts of device, discipline and standardization, proposed by the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. These concepts gave us a better understanding of the creation and format of both associations and the magazines they produced. At the end of this work we did conclude that the actions of these women in the press represent a conquest to them in a space predominantly reserved for men, where the female presence was discriminated and even denied. The women began to exercise a prominent place in the reproduction, propagation and defense of the ideologies proposed by the New State in Brazil and Portugal.