Story of Nísia Floresta

This month will be dedicated to the stories of Portuguese Language Writers.

Lively, dynamic and with many accents, this language unites people from countries such as Angola, Brazil, Mozambique, Portugal and others. So, here we will have different stories.

To open this conversation, I chose the little-known story of Nísia Floresta, the Brazilian considered the first feminist in Brazil. A woman who used writing and educational practice to question the condition of women.

Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta is the pseudonym of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto. She was born in Rio Grande do Norte, daughter of the Portuguese Dionísio Gonçalves Pinto, who came to Brazil from Portugal at the beginning of the 19th century and worked as a lawyer, and the Brazilian Antônia Clara Freire, heiress of one of the main families in the region.

Her childhood was marked by many changes of cities, which may have contributed to her having a closer look at different realities.

These displacements are explained by the persecution that the father suffered not only due to the anti-Portuguese revolutionary movements, but because as a lawyer he took on cases that went against the interests of large landowners. He even ends up murdered later in Olinda. 

The formative basis of her most avant-garde spirit would still include the experience of an unwanted marriage at the age of 13. However, just a few months later she runs away and returns to the family home, carrying with her the judgment of her own family and society for being “divorced”.

Could his revolutionary spirit already be perceived from a very young age? Or, in fact, is it exactly the lived experience that gives rise to the feminist purpose that she would pursue for the rest of her days?

After 5 years of her first marriage, she began dating Manuel Augusto de Faria Rocha, an academic at the Faculty of Law of Olinda and has two children with him.

The year 1831 is marked by her first publications, a series of articles in the newspaper about the female condition, being one of the pioneering women in contributing to a national press, which was still taking its first steps. 

In 1832, she published her first book: Direito das Mulheres e Injustiça dos Homens, signing for the first time with the pseudonym Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta (Nísia which is taken from Dionísia; Floresta which was the name of the farm where she was born; Brasileira, as she was proud of her country and Augusta in honor of his companion Manuel Augusto).

Nísia wrote several works in defense of the rights of women, Indians and slaves, being a recognized abolitionist. Among them are:

• Advice to my daughter, 1842
• Fany or The Model of Maidens, 1847
• Humanitarian booklet, 1853: appreciated by Auguste Comte , father of positivism, with whom she took classes when she lived in Europe.
• Pages of an Obscure Life, 1855
• The Woman, 1859
• Le Brésil, 1871
• Fragments d'um ouvrage inèdit: notes biographiques, 1878

In times when women did not have the right to vote or even work without their husband's permission, she opened a school for girls unlike any other.

Colégio Augusto had in its pedagogical proposal an education for women, equivalent to the best men's schools of the time. They learned Portuguese grammar, writing and reading; French and Italian; natural and social sciences; mathematics; music and dance.

Her way of thinking was disturbing. She faced patriarchal criticism such as this one published in the newspaper: “… there was no shortage of language work; those with needles were left in the dark. Husbands need a wife who works more and talks less.”

Nísia wrote: "What right do they [men] have to despise us, and claim superiority over us, for an exercise that they share equally with us? Everyone knows, and it cannot be denied, that men look with contempt for the job of raising children and that, in their eyes,  is a low and despicable function; but if they consulted nature on this part, they would feel without having to been told, that there is no job in the Welfare State that deserves more honor, trust and reward".

The relevance of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto for a historical vision of feminism in Brazil is undeniable. Her writing helps to retrace female emancipation in Brazil.