Maria Augusta Coelho Meira de Vasconcellos: sem mandato, mas com tribuna – um esboço da participação política e educacional das mulheres no início da República

Abstract

This research seeks to understand the process of configuring the female individualcitizen and the impasses faced in the affirmation of her sovereignty and in the achievement of citizenship in the national political body with the advent of the Republic. The investigation focuses on the constitution of Brazilian Political and Social Thought at a specific moment, namely, the end of the Empire and beginning of the Republic (1870-1890), a unique moment to understand the historical development of Brazilian rights construction processes and Social Thought that sought to account for the new country in emergence. Amid abolitionist agitations, the establishment of universal suffrage in Europe, the creation of some democracies around the world, with emphasis on the democracy of the United States. This thesis, which underpins this research, deals with the social history of the formation of a thought that originated in the social trajectory of the first woman to run for deputy in the country, linked to a series of publications of her ideas and allied to the actions carried out by newspapers in the “public sphere” where Maria Augusta Coelho Meira de Vasconcellos and other publicists began to actively demand their participation in the construction of political proposals for the nation: such as the right to vote and access to education for women. The political-historical framework, according to the theoretical-methodological bibliographic, exploratory and documentary framework used, would be a consequence of the three centuries of History that had passed, a period that constitutes a precious key to understanding Brazil today. The problem here is to understand how the politicalsocial thought of Maria Augusta C. M. Vasconcellos was forged, the fourth woman to graduate from the Recife Law School, having participated in local political life and challenged the limitations imposed on women. I intend to understand how education, public instruction, political citizenship and women's emancipation were linked in her thinking, whether in her work at the Recife Law School, in her publications in the press at the time, or in her attempts to file lawsuits by the graduate, thus configuring a way of acting that was both rebellious and sovereign in the face of the denial of her political citizenship, still at the end of the 19th century.