Introduction: Women Journalists in the Brazilian Belle Époque: The case of O País (1884–1912)

The research involved identifying a diverse group of over thirty women writers and analysing more than a thousand texts, including the four authors whose works are examined in this book. Their chronicles, short stories, and novels were directed primarily at the growing female readership of everyday matters and invite us to re-evaluate the presence of women writers in the mainstream press and their role as cultural mediators and opinion formers.1 Poetry and cookery recipes were not collected, as they were frequently found in the newspapers of the time and were often signed by unidentified pseudonyms. In a male-dominated world, some women writers managed to make a name for themselves; hence the importance of enquiring about their strategies to carve out a place in the Rio de Janeiro literary and cultural networks. As well as enhancing our knowledge of the history of the press and the strategies used to diversify its audience, our research project also encompasses gender studies, as it has unearthed previously unknown texts and invites reflection on the progress and setbacks of the feminist agenda and how it came into line with and drifted away from the socio-political struggles of O País. This material is being published in the ‘Women in the newspaper O País’ book collection, in open-access digital editions in Portuguese, accompanied by extensive studies on the personal and intellectual trajectories of the contributors, an examination of the texts in terms of the ideals expressed, the space occupied in the geography of the newspaper, and the dialogues held with other periodicals and with the Brazilian socio-political context.2 See Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Tania Regina de Luca, ‘Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho: De Portugal para o Brasil’, in Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, Conversas lisbonenses e outros escritos (1884–1889), Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva Tania Regina de Luca (eds) (Campinas: FE – Unicamp, 2022), pp. 9–34, <www.fe.unicamp.br/noticias/editora-fe-unicamp-publica-e-book-maria-amalia-vaz-de-carvalho-conversas-lisbonenses-e> [accessed 20 Feb. 2024]. The aim is to bring to the fore the social, cultural, and intellectual role these women writers played in the newspaper. The publications, with updated spelling and critical commentary, fill a significant gap in the history of the Brazilian press and written culture, helping explain their participation in the development of the chronicle and short story as literary-journalistic genres and in the formation of an intellectual field in the Rio de Janeiro Belle Époque.

Before introducing the authors examined in each chapter of this book, which were written by the project members, it is important to clarify the reasons that led to the selection of O País, the objectives and methodologies of the research, as well as the periodisation and historical conditions prevalent at the time in Brazilian society, which underwent major transformations at the turn of the twentieth century, and, more specifically, the nascent Brazilian literary field, for which the press served as the primary pathway to professionalisation.