Technical innovations and social changes in the late nineteenth century
Having lived from 1847 to 1921, the writer witnessed the profound transformations that marked the turn of the twentieth century. Her professional career was made possible by technical innovations and the consequent opportunities, starting with railroads and steamships, that not only allowed people to cross continents and oceans in a much shorter time, but also brought a new pace to daily life, due to set routes and predictable schedules, in so far as overcoming long distances was no longer an undertaking shrouded in risk and uncertainty. The effects of such advances can be evaluated when one takes into account that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the stagecoach between Paris and Lyon, considered fast, covered 500 kilometres in five days, which confirms Paul Valéry’s shrewd observation that Napoleon moved around as slowly as Julius Caesar.
1 Renato Ortiz, Cultura e Modernidade. A França no Século XIX (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1991), pp. 219 and 217. The modern ships, which no longer depended on the winds, carried a wide variety of goods, passengers, and also the pieces written by contributors and correspondents based in Europe, which arrived punctually at South American ports, as was the case with the texts that Maria Amália sent from Lisbon (Figure 1.1).
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Figure 1.1: Manuscript by Maria Amalia sent from Lisbon to the newspaper O País. The text was divided into parts (B1, B2) and possibly composed by different typesetters.
Source: Biblioteca Nacional (Rio de Janeiro), http://acervo.bndigital.bn.br/sophia/index.asp?codigo_sophia=5667.
Add to that the revolution brought about by the telegraph, which interconnected the entire planet and made the immediate transmission of information at least a possibility on the horizon. In 1874, the connection between South America and Europe was completed by submarine cable, which left from the old Portuguese parish of Carcavelos, passed through the islands of Madeira and São Vicente, arrived at the shore in Recife and, from there, ran to Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. Events that took place in remote regions were immediately broadcast in the newspapers and read by thousands of individuals, connected by the fact that they shared the same information. According to Briggs and Burke, for
The Times (London, 1875), the cable represented ‘the greatest discovery since Columbus’, while the writer Charles Dickens pondered that ‘in an age of express trains, painless operations, crystal palaces […] and a hundred curiosities, such as our grandfathers and grandmothers never dreamt about’, the telegraph represented ‘of our generation of marvels, […] the most marvellous’.
2 Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: from Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002), p. 135.Not only did the means of disseminating information change but print production itself reached new heights. Manual workshops gave way to increasingly faster and more powerful steam or electricity-driven printing presses, fed with better quality, pulp-based paper in reels, to replace the rags, which had hitherto been customarily used. Since 1885, thanks to the Linotype, the slow typesetting procedure had been mechanised, aligning the process of text composition with that of printing.
3 Roger Chartier, ‘L’Ancien Régime Typographique: Réflexions sur Quelques Travaux Récentes’. Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 36 (1981), pp. 191–209, <www.persee.fr/doc/ ahess_0395–2649_1981_num_36_2_282728> [accessed 11 Jan. 2024]. These transformations allowed printers to cope with the exponential demand for printed material coming from the financial sector, industry, and commerce, the booming school system, booksellers interested in cheap editions of novels, the nascent advertising sector, with its posters splayed across walls to advertise all sorts of products, including the world of entertainment, and newspapers and magazines, which were increasingly diversified and aimed at specific audiences, in step with the accelerated urbanization of the main European capitals and the increased level of literacy of large contingents of the population, including women, shaping what was named media culture.
4 Jean-Yves Mollier, A Leitura e seu Público no Mundo Contemporâneo (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2008), p. 191.It was also during the nineteenth century that movements arose in defence of women’s education and participation in political life, but these were soon met with strong opposition. Scientific discourse, the legislation in force, and even common sense insisted on defending the family and the limits imposed by nature on the female sex, characterised as fragile, dependent on constant supervision and care, whose habitat was limited to the domestic universe, composed of the triad of marriage, motherhood, and submission.
5 Irene Vaquinhas, ‘Senhoras e Mulheres’ na Sociedade Portuguesa do Século XIX (Lisbon: Colibri, 2000). The winds brought by the new bourgeois order, anchored in science, progress, and the growing need for manpower, tended to shuffle social markers and place on the horizon future possibilities that destabilised what had hitherto been accepted as self-evident – a process that opened up fissures and opportunities for negotiation in terms of social norms and parameters that had previously been considered unalterable.
6 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).Newspapers and magazines played an important role in the debate about the social place reserved for women, whether it was to warn about the threats and dangers of behaviour that challenged the status quo, a largely dominant position, or to propose renovations, which was the mission of small-scale papers and leaflets, usually run by women who dared to defy tradition. However, between these two extremes, there was space for female voices that offered compromise, so much so that some managed to break boundaries, establish themselves as intellectuals and writers, and enter the restricted and unreceptive male-dominated world of writing, as demonstrated by Carvalho’s journey.