Maria Lacerda de Moura

Maria Lacerda de Moura (16 May 1887 – 20 March 1945) was a Brazilian teacher, writer and anarcha-feminist. The daughter of spiritist and anti-clerical parents, she grew up in the city of Barbacena, in the interior of Minas Gerais, where she graduated as a teacher at the Escola Normal Municipal de Barbacena and participated in official efforts to tackle social inequality through national literacy campaigns and educational reforms.

She began to publish crônicas in a local newspaper in 1912 and in 1918 she published her first book, Em torno da educação, made up of crônicas and conferences she gave in Barbacena on the subject of education. From then on, she established contacts with journalists and writers from Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. During this period, she met José Oiticica and adopted the progressive education methods of Maria Montessori and Francesc Ferrer. She moved to São Paulo in 1921, at the age of 34, and there she had contacts with the feminist movement and the labor movement of the time. She even collaborated with the feminist Bertha Lutz and presided over the International Women's Federation. In 1922, she broke with the women's associations, which were fundamentally concerned with women's suffrage, because she considered that the fight for the right to vote answered a very limited part of women's needs. She collaborated assiduously with the labor and progressive press in São Paulo and in 1923 launched the magazine Renascença.

Between 1928 and 1937, she lived in a farming community in Guararema, in the interior of São Paulo, formed by individualist anarchists and Spanish, French, and Italian deserters from World War I. It was the period of her life in which she produced and acted the most, collaborating weekly in the newspaper O Combate, where she established the polemic of greatest impact with the local fascist press; she gave conferences in Uruguay and Argentina, invited by anti-fascist educational institutions; she met Luís Carlos Prestes, in exile in Buenos Aires; she gave pacifist conferences and triggered the anti-fascist campaign in São Paulo. The Guararema community was disbanded with political repression during the Estado Novo. In 1938, Maria Lacerda moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she worked at Rádio Mayrink Veiga reading horoscopes. She died on 20 March 1945.

Considered one of the pioneers of feminism in Brazil, her work dealt with subjects such as the condition of women, free love, the right to sexual pleasure, divorce, conscientious motherhood, prostitution, the fight against clericalism, fascism, and militarism, and established a link between the problem of women's emancipation and the struggle for the emancipation of the individual from capitalism. Her positions share many similar aspects with those of later second-wave feminists.

Biography

Early years

In 1887, Maria Lacerda de Moura was born in Manhuaçu, in the province of Minas Gerais. In 1891, when she was 4 years old, she moved with her parents and siblings to the city of Barbacena, where her father worked in the Orphans' Registry Office and her mother made confectionery. She began her studies at the boarding school of the city's orphanage and, when she was 12, she enrolled in the Escola Normal Municipal de Barbacena. At that time, the Catholic Church maintained a dominant position over families, public education and politics in Minas Gerais. Due to her family's spiritualist and anti-clerical inclinations, from a young age, Maria Lacerda faced discrimination by the bishops of the province.

Teaching in Barbacena and first writings

In 1904, she graduated as a teacher and, by 1908, she had become the director of the Barbacena Pedagogium. From this post, Maria Lacerda participated in a number of campaigns to address social inequality, by improving literacy rates and advancing education reform. She soon came to adopt the progressive education methods of the Italian feminist educator Maria Montessori and the Catalan anarchist pedagogue Francesc Ferrer. In 1912, she published her first crônicas in a local newspaper, which caused a conflict with her relatives due to her lack of moderation. In 1918, she collected a number of her crônicas and conference speeches into a book on education: Em torno da educação.

At this time, Maria Lacerda also began to form links with Barbacena's feminist associations. As she grew increasingly concerned with the condition that women found themselves in at the time, she began to look for ways to improve it, publicising a number of feminist initiatives that were taking place in Brazil's big cities. By 1919, she had joined the movement for women's suffrage and enthusiastically took up the defense of women's rights to citizenship. As time went on, the news coming from the larger cities drew more of her attention away from her home town. In the following years, Maria Lacerda attended a series of conferences in other cities like Juiz de Fora and Santos, which convinced her to finally leave Barbacena in 1921.

Feminist and anarchist activity in São Paulo

At the age of 34, Maria Lacerda moved to the São Paulo state capital of São Paulo, where she joined the growing feminist movement, and also made contact with the nascent labor movement. No longer working within the state's official framework, in the radical climate of São Paulo, she was able to develop her sociopolitical ideas and advance her pedagogical activities. While working as a private teacher, she also contributed articles about education to a number of independent and progressive publications, including A Plebe, A Tribuna and O Combate, and by 1923, she was editing the progressive monthly magazine Renascença. Through this publication, Maria Lacerda began to collaborate with the artist Ângelo Guido, who worked as the graphic designer for Renascença and the cover artist for Religião do amor e da beleza, and who drew her towards the esoteric religion of theosophy.

Having already joined the feminist movement while she still lived in Barbacena, upon moving to São Paulo, Maria Lacerda joined Bertha Lutz in co-founding the International Women's Federation (IWF), which aimed to improve women's conditions and society as a whole through women's own combined efforts. Maria Lacerda became the IWF's President and focused her pedagogical efforts on creating a comprehensive curriculum for women's education that included women's history. She also delegated Bertha Lutz to represent the IWF at the Pan-American Women's Conference in Baltimore. But by 1922, she had already begun to break with the organization, as it was growing increasingly concerned only with women's suffrage, which Maria Lacerda herself considered to be an insufficient goal for the feminist movement.

From this period, Maria Lacerda became closer with the Brazilian anarchist movement, despite a number of disagreements with other anarchists over her support for the Soviet education system spearhead by Anatoly Lunacharsky. Despite their criticisms of her position on this issue, Maria Lacerda continued collaborating closeley with the anarchist and syndicalist movement well into the 1930s. In 1926, she became attracted to a form of individualist anarchism from the works of Han Ryner, who greatly inspired her to adopt even more radical conceptions of self-improvement and individual liberty.