Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233

Eileen Hunt Botting and Charlotte Hammond Matthews, ‘Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth for Latin American Feminism’
Gender & History, Vol.26 No.1 April 2014, pp. 64–83.

Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft

Myth for Latin American Feminism
Eileen Hunt Botting and Charlotte Hammond Matthews

Nı́sia Floresta’s Direitos das mulheres e injustiça dos homens (Rights of Women and In-
justice of Men) (1832) is often cited as one of the founding texts of Brazilian and Latin
American feminism.1 Its significance within Latin American history and literature has
led scholars to emphasise its connection to the first canonised work in the European
feminist tradition, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).2
More recently it has been shown that Floresta’s use of Wollstonecraft is symbolic, not
literal; she did not ‘loosely’ translate the Rights of Woman as has been widely as-
sumed, but merely invoked Wollstonecraft’s name and part of the title of her Rights
of Woman on the title page for a translation of another lesser-known Enlightenment
work on the equality of the sexes, Woman not Inferior to Man (1739).3 This arti-
cle provides new evidence of Floresta’s use and translation of European texts on
the woman question other than Wollstonecraft’s in her Direitos. Challenging the
enduring description of Floresta as the original ‘translator’ of Wollstonecraft for
Brazil and its nascent feminist cause, we argue that she should instead be seen
as the most influential Latin American intellectual to disseminate Wollstonecraft’s
name for symbolic political ends in her local engagement with the women’s rights
issue.
To support this revisionist thesis, we employ what the political theorist Martyn
Thompson calls a ‘revised Rezeptionsgeschichte’ approach to intellectual history. This
modified form of German literary reception history pays attention to the historical con-
texts within which authors produce texts (such as the post-1789 French revolutionary
backdrop for the 1792 Rights of Woman or the post-1822 Brazilian independence land-
scape for the 1832 Direitos). Yet this genealogical approach also examines readers’
shifting, historically-situated encounters with past authors (such as Floresta’s supposed
early encounter with Wollstonecraft). By looking at the latter phenomenon, we come to
understand how ‘creative misreadings’ of past authors and texts can be crucial for the
historical development of political ideas such as feminism.4 Following the historical
work of Karen Offen, we use the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ to describe arguments
or activism against patriarchy and male privilege on behalf of the well-being of women
as a group, in any culture or epoch.5
By merging the methods of reception theorists such as Thompson and histori-
ans of international thought such as David Armitage, we are able to situate Floresta
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 Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth 65

within broader trends concerning the symbolic reception of Wollstonecraft in dis-

course on women’s rights in Latin America during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.6 From Brazil to Argentina to Texas and back to Brazil, we trace a genealogy
of Wollstonecraft’s deployment as a political symbol of women’s rights in and for
Latin American feminism, often in ways that distorted facts about her life, work and
legacies. Throughout this exercise in comparative and international political thought,
Brazil functions as our primary national case study (supported by evidence from 1799
to 1929), with the early twentieth-century Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires and
Mexican-American community of San Antonio serving as supplemental cases in the
triangulation. The comparative study of the supplemental regional cases illuminates
the broader significance of trends found in the background case of Brazil: most impor-
tantly, the enduring international salience of Wollstonecraft as a political symbol for
feminist ideas, among both detractors and advocates of the cause. The cross-national
reason for this trend is that Wollstonecraft – the pre-eminent internationally known the-
orist of women’s rights before John Stuart Mill – was one of the only widely recognised
political symbols of women’s rights in the early to mid-nineteenth century. In a new
finding, we show that in 1827 a Brazilian senator successfully used her as a negative
symbol of women’s rights in legislative debates about the right to female education
in the new constitution. Wollstonecraft had symbolic cachet among the earliest post-
independence political elites not only in the United States, as the scholarship of Susan
Branson, Rosemarie Zagarri and Nancy Isenberg has established, but also in Brazil.7
Wollstonecraft’s later appearance in Spanish-language publications in Argentina and
Texas as well as Portuguese newspapers in Brazil shows her multi-lingual translation
into a political symbol for the international character of feminism as it grew into a
formal (public, organised and collective) social movement at the turn of twentieth
century.
Political symbols – or widely recognisable representations of political ideas –
are a vital part of any social movement.8 In order for a political idea to become
the organising basis for a social movement, a symbol needs to be identified as its
public marker. This symbol must be easily recognisable in the public sphere, so that
people can latch onto it in their responses to the cause at hand and thereby associate
the cause with the symbol. The symbol becomes shorthand for the movement at
large and the ideas that drive it. Both negative and positive uses of the symbol promote
the growth of the movement by instigating debates, attracting attention to the cause,
inspiring recruits to join and endowing the cause with an overarching sense of history
and purpose. Wollstonecraft helped fulfil these roles for feminism, by serving as
a marker of the movement’s philosophical origins, its social consequences and its
radical political aspirations. Her name, gender, life story and ideas were symbolically
invoked in discussions of the issue of women’s rights far beyond her homeland of
Britain, in many languages and cultural contexts.9 Wollstonecraft is thus an example
of how a political symbol from a particular linguistic and national context becomes
internationalised through its successive iterative transformations in other cultures.
In Latin American feminism, Wollstonecraft became, over time, a political sym-
bol and a source for myth making because she was both culturally exotic (as a women’s
rights advocate with a rebellious reputation) and culturally authoritative (as part of the
European colonial culture and its political and philosophical Enlightenment). Indeed,
Latin American feminists and scholars to the present day have responded more to the
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66 Gender & History

symbolic value – and less to the historical inaccuracy – of Floresta’s description of

Direitos as a loose translation of Wollstonecraft. Propelled by the case of Brazil, Woll-
stonecraft has become a kind of mythological figure for Latin American feminists and
scholars of Latin American feminism, a rallying point for debates over the relationship
of locally rooted women’s rights activism with colonial and European culture.10
Three factors converged in the symbolic reception of Wollstonecraft for Latin
America in the long nineteenth century. First, the traffic of intellectual and po-
litical ideas across the Atlantic and within the Americas led to the broad recep-
tion of revolutionary-era French and British writers, including but not limited to
Wollstonecraft.11 Second, her husband William Godwin’s scandalous Memoirs of the
Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1798) provoked the transatlantic use
of Wollstonecraft as an anti-revolutionary morality tale for how women’s rights would
lead to sexual immorality and religious infidelity.12 Third, the symbolic juxtaposition
of Wollstonecraft with Latin America evoked the exotic quality of the radical cause of
women’s rights within the internalised colonial perception of Latin America as a polit-
ical frontier. By the turn of the twentieth century, this third factor became increasingly
salient, such that she became a public marker of visionary European ideas that could aid
the project of development, democratisation and the emergent ‘movimiento feminista’
in Latin America.13 Through this genealogy of Wollstonecraft’s use as a symbol of
women’s rights for Latin America, we challenge two competing myths in the history
of feminism: the idea that Wollstonecraft was not widely engaged in any country in the
century after the publication of the Memoirs, and the view of her Rights of Woman as
a philosophical inspiration for Floresta and Brazilian feminism.14 In contrast to both
of these common misrepresentations of her legacies, we show the relevance of Woll-
stonecraft as a political symbol and myth for and within the development of feminism
in colonial and post-colonial Latin America.

Rumours about Wollstonecraft in the Americas, 1799–1827

British and European colonialism – for all its shameful evils – had established long-
standing conduits for European culture to the American continents and the Caribbean,
especially texts in Spanish, Portuguese, French and English. In addition, traffic within
the Americas meant that there were plenty of opportunities for cross-fertilisation
of ideas across the continents and the islands, particularly on matters of republican
politics.15 Through these cultural conduits came Mary Wollstonecraft as a political
icon of the place of the modern, rights-bearing woman for the Americas.
The 1799 travel diary of Hipólito José da Costa of Brazil illustrates how traffic
within the Americas was a likely path for the reception of Wollstonecraft by Latin
Americans. Costa, who later became a strong advocate of representative republican
government for Brazil, travelled to Philadelphia in 1798 on a business venture.16 It is
not surprising that he encountered and recorded a debate on Wollstonecraft’s life and
ideas during a visit to Long Island Sound in 1799. Her name and work were well known
in the United States during the Federalist era, especially in the cities of Philadelphia,
Boston and New York.17 Within months of the publication of her Vindication of the
Rights of Woman in London, Paris, Lyon and Boston in early 1792, Wollstonecraft
had become the first internationally renowned women’s rights advocate.18 She was
generally well-received in the United States until the 1798–99 publication of the
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 Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth 67

scandalous Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ in

London and Philadelphia coincided with the rise of anti-Jacobin, Francophobe politics
under the Adams administration.19 William Godwin’s Memoirs – naively striving to
present a transparent account of his wife’s revolutionary life – revealed her premarital
sexual relationships and suggested that she might have died an atheist. Anti-Jacobin
discourse in Britain and the United States quickly cast her as a powerful oppositional
symbol of the morally corrosive effects of women’s rights advocacy and other French
revolutionary political causes.20 Wollstonecraft’s works – especially the Rights of
Woman – continued to be read and received with earnestness in the United States,
but people often publicly distanced themselves from her undeserved yet prevalent
reputation as a radical infidel and sexual wanton.21
Costa’s entry in his diary for 1 September 1799 describes a conversation about
Wollstonecraft with an American lady during a sailing trip in Long Island Sound. He
records several rumours swirling around Wollstonecraft in the wake of her tragic and
youthful death in London in 1797, as a result of a childbirth infection:
We were opposite Stone-Brooklin yesterday morning, and after a tolerable American lunch, the
breeze cooled us down and we carried on. Mrs Wollstonecraft, the author of Revenge of the Rights
of Woman, died in Boston, and was married to a very bad man, so a lady just told me. ‘It’s hardly
surprising that they didn’t get on’, I replied to her.22

The misinformation about the title of Wollstonecraft’s book and her supposed death
in Boston, combined with the allusion to her marriage to a bad husband, indicates
the pervasiveness and maliciousness of rumours about Wollstonecraft during the anti-
Jacobin backlash against her. Costa does not seem to doubt the veracity of this rumour;
indeed, he contributes to its escalation by implying that Wollstonecraft, as an advocate
of women’s ‘revenge’ against their male oppressors, would probably incite the aggres-
sion of her husband. His record of the conversation in his diary indicates how even a
well-educated person might easily have developed the wrong impression about Woll-
stonecraft from such gossip and reported it as fact. It also shows how Wollstonecraft
could be a symbol of the controversial and even dangerous idea of women’s rights
for a Latin American elite as much as his North American counterparts during the
post-revolutionary, transatlantic backlash against political radicalism.23
Indeed, just such an example of this negative symbolism, and the inaccuracies in
reports of Wollstonecraft’s life, can be found in the Brazilian Senate in 1827. During
discussions on the details of a new law for public primary education in Brazil, it was
proposed that the curriculum taught to girls (hitherto equal to that of boys, according
to the wording of the 1824 constitution) should be reduced, removing more complex
mathematics and keeping only the four basic operations. In a lengthy discussion about
what should and should not be taught to girls, the Viscount of Cairu (1756–1835) –
an extremely influential and respected political figure in Brazil both before and after
independence – emphatically stated his support for the narrowing of the curriculum
taught to girls, with the following justification of that position:
There have been women who have even launched themselves on the sea of Politics, especially
after the French Revolution. The results have not been good. It will be enough to name the famous
Englishwoman Volstoncraft [sic], who also produced the Work of the Rights of Woman, with the
same extravagance as the Work of the celebrated Paine on the Rights of Man. She, following the
accusation of her husband, was condemned in London as an adulteress, and did not restore her

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68 Gender & History

reputation with her marriage to another enthusiast, Godwin, author of the revolutionary Work to
which he gave the misleading name Political Justice.24

The Viscount’s observation – and his further recommendation that girls might more
profitably be taught the basics of Natural History, in order to decorate their houses
with the most beautiful of Brazil’s flowers – concluded the debate on the curriculum
to be set out for girls. Votes were cast, and the proposed amendment was approved.25
It is interesting to note that a vote on the proposal taken the previous day had resulted
in a draw, indicating that there was in fact some considerable support among Senators
for the teaching of more complex mathematics to girls, and this position was defended
in the debate with the suggestion that widows might thus be able to continue their
deceased husbands’ trades.26 It is certainly true that female education in general found
considerable support among the liberal thinkers tasked with shaping Brazil after inde-
pendence. However, the extent of the discrepancy between political theory and social
reality should not be underestimated. Wider parental and social prejudices, coupled
with a severe shortage of qualified women teachers, meant that very few girls in Brazil
received the schooling envisioned by the nation’s legislators. After the passing of the
Additional Act of 1834, which devolved responsibility for primary schooling to the
provinces, the provision of public primary education to both boys and girls floundered
in much of the country. As late as the 1880s, fewer than 13 per cent of boys and 6 per
cent of girls received any schooling at all.27
It is clear from the Viscount of Cairu’s speech that he considered Wollstonecraft
as a personality to be ‘famous’ and expected his fellow Senators to be familiar with
her name. What is equally clear, however – and equally telling – is that he was
by no means well-informed about the details of her life, suggesting that he might
have learnt of her reputation through second-hand accounts, and had not himself
read Godwin’s biography. Here, perhaps, we have the culmination of just the sort of
flippant observation made by Hipólito José da Costa in 1799 – Wollstonecraft’s name
being calculatedly and effectively employed as a symbol of dangerous and debauched
femininity in order to argue against women’s emancipation in a national political
context.

Nı́sia Floresta and the rise of Wollstonecraft as a feminist symbol in Brazil,

1832–53
It was within this very context that a young woman from Brazil’s north-east, with
her own scandalous back story of abandoned marriage and subsequent legally adul-
terous union, chose to translate and publish a radical defence of women’s equal
rights and intellectual capacity purportedly written by Mary Wollstonecraft.28 Nı́sia
Floresta Brasileira Augusta (1810–1885) might fairly be identified as the most sig-
nificant woman writer of the early and mid-nineteenth century in Brazil. She was an
extraordinarily active and productive woman, publishing eight works in Brazil between
1832 and 1856, and a further five in Europe (published in Florence and Paris), where
she lived from 1856 until her death. She wrote extensively about women’s education
and their wider position in society, but also about many of the other pressing issues
of her day, including slavery, political ideology and national identity. She taught an
exceptionally – and controversially – broad curriculum in the private girls’ school that
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 Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth 69

she ran in Rio de Janeiro for the better part of two decades and, once in Europe, she
travelled extensively. In combining all these aspects she was unique among the very
few women of her day who succeeded in breaching the wall of Brazilian patriarchy
and setting foot in the public sphere.
Yet it has mainly been her first publication, her ‘translation of Mary Woll-
stonecraft’, that has attracted the most attention in modern scholarship and upon which
her position in Brazil’s feminist canon has primarily been constructed. This text was
first published in Recife in 1832 under the full title (translated from the Portuguese)
Rights of Women and Injustice of Men, by Mistriss [sic] Godwin. Translated freely
from the French into Portuguese, and offered to the Women and Academics of Brazil
by Nı́sia Floresta Brasileira Augusta. It is the first known work published in Brazil to
claim women’s intellectual equality with men explicitly and to advocate their right to
an equal education, even suggesting that, thus equipped, women would be perfectly
able to perform any public function as well as, if not better than, men. Revolutionary
in its argument and merciless in its depiction of men’s selfishness and stupidity, it is
hardly surprising that even as its translator, this text subsequently earned Floresta the
title of the precursor to feminism in Brazil, and even Latin America.29
However, it is not only the surprising content that has earned Direitos such
importance within Floresta’s oeuvre and in the question of her canonicity. The supposed
original author of the text has arguably been afforded even greater significance. Floresta
herself tells us quite clearly that the author of this piece is Mary Wollstonecraft,
identified by her married name, and for more than a century it was assumed that the
text was a translation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. There is no recorded
evidence from the first century after the publication of Direitos of any comparison
being made with the assumed source text, and by the 1940s all copies were thought to
be lost. Only in the late 1980s, when the text was relocated and re-edited by Constância
Lima Duarte, was such a comparison finally made and the vast differences between
the two texts were revealed, in both content and style.
In light of these differences, Duarte concluded that Floresta had in fact written
her own work, inspired by the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft but shaped by her own,
very different, Brazilian context.30 The notion that Floresta had herself penned such
radical arguments clearly afforded the writer and her early publication a far greater
significance than its previous status as mere translation had done. As Duarte observed,
with Direitos as an original work, ‘our author positions herself on an equal footing with
Wollstonecraft and with European thought’.31 However, despite Direitos revealing no
discernible connection with Wollstonecraft’s work (beyond its subject matter in the
broadest sense), Duarte continued to emphasise the influence of Wollstonecraft on
the text, and elsewhere Floresta’s imagined connection with the famous British writer
remained central to her reputation.
Then in 1995, Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke identified Direitos as a very faithful
translation of a much less well-known and considerably earlier English feminist text
entitled Woman not Inferior to Man: or A Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural
Right of the Fair-Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity and Esteem, with the
Men, published in London in 1739 by ‘Sophia, A Person of Quality’.32 Furthermore,
although not pursued by Pallares-Burke, Floresta did not translate directly from the
original English text, but from the French (as stated in the full title of Direitos). A very

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70 Gender & History

faithful French translation of Sophia’s text had been published in 1750 and reprinted
in 1751.33
However, despite the significant nature of this discovery – which overturns all
previous claims made for Direitos and clearly reveals that Floresta’s first publication
has no relationship with the work of Mary Wollstonecraft – it has been almost entirely
overlooked, and Floresta continues to be identified with that most famous of feminist
writers. Whether with the simplistic epithet of ‘translator of Mary Wollstonecraft’ –
still the preferred marker in cases of a fleeting mention of Floresta – or with the
continued suggestion that Direitos is an essentially original text that draws inspiration
from Rights of Woman, Floresta’s position in Brazil’s feminist canon continues to be
constructed upon what is, in truth, a mythical association with Wollstonecraft.34
The one connection that Direitos and Floresta do still have with Wollstonecraft
is the identification of ‘Mistriss Godwin’ as the original author of the text. Maria
Lúcia Pallares-Burke addressed this issue in her 1995 article, suggesting that Flo-
resta might have preferred the more radical positioning of Sophia’s text, but wished
to pay homage to the kindred revolutionary spirit reflected in Wollstonecraft’s per-
sonal life.35 This is also a question that Charlotte Hammond Matthews took up
at some length in her 2010 article on Direitos, concluding that Floresta was more
likely to have attributed the text to a very well-known writer in a bid to at-
tract readers to her translation, observing that ‘none [of the possible explanations
for Floresta’s surprising act of authorial misappropriation] escape the realm of
speculation’.36
In 2011, we discovered via research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, what
is undoubtedly the missing piece in this complex puzzle. In 1826 César Gardeton –
a prolific author of musical and gastronomic reviews and, it seems, an enthusiastic
(re)producer of feminist literature – published a book entitled Les Droits des Femmes,
et l’Injustice des Hommes; par Mistriss Godwin. Traduit librement de l’Anglais, sur la
huitième edition.37 This text is an exact reproduction, barring orthographical updates
(and title, of course), of the 1750/51 French translation of Sophia’s Woman Not Inferior
to Man mentioned above. There can be no doubt, then, that this 1826 publication is
the text Floresta translated – title, supposed author and all. In one fell swoop, we
have a very simple explanation both for Direitos’s overtly challenging title and its
false attribution to Wollstonecraft, as well as a rather more plausible, though no less
fascinating, scenario for how a relatively obscure feminist tract from 1730s London
came to be translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil almost a century later.
What, then, can we draw from this new information for an analysis of Direitos
and its place in the development of feminism in Latin America? The first thing to be
observed is that it does not fundamentally alter the conclusions to be drawn regarding
the origins of Floresta’s first publication. Direitos remains a faithful reproduction of
the ideas of the anonymous Sophia – with hefty input from Poulain de la Barre, of
course – having simply passed through an additional reincarnation in France before
reaching Brazil. In fact, we must conclude that Floresta’s own input into her early
translation was even more minimal than previously believed, since neither the bold
and antagonistic title, nor the intriguing attribution of the text to ‘Mistriss Godwin’ are
of her creation. It is certainly to be hoped that our identification of Gardeton’s Droits
des Femmes et l’Injustice des Hommes as the source text for Floresta’s translation will

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 Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth 71

finally put to bed the persistent myth that she either translated or took inspiration from
Wollstonecraft.
However, when we consider the circumstances by which Floresta came to translate
this text, it now seems almost certain that she believed the text in front of her to be
the work of Wollstonecraft. She would have had no reason to doubt the validity of the
named author. It is possible, of course, that Floresta (aged only twenty-two at the time)
had no idea who this ‘Mistriss Godwin’ was and simply chose to translate a text that
interested her, but this seems unlikely. The considerable success that Direitos enjoyed
in Brazil, being subsequently reprinted and put on sale in both Porto Alegre in 1834
and in Rio de Janeiro in 1838, would certainly suggest that Floresta’s readers believed
themselves to be purchasing the work of the famous English writer.
The notion that Floresta believed the work before her to be that of Wollstonecraft
is, of course, the most significant element of what is to be learnt from this new discovery.
While it was not difficult to believe that a young, educated woman might have chosen
to translate a text that defended women’s intellectual and social equality purely on
the appeal of its content, the considerable disparity between the radical claims to be
found in Direitos and the rather more conservative ideas espoused by Floresta in her
own subsequent writings cannot be denied, and some scholars have debated the reason
for this disparity.38 This issue seems rather less relevant when it becomes apparent
that Floresta believed herself to be translating the work of a writer whose name was
synonymous with the notion of women’s rights. The decision to translate the work of
an already (in)famous writer, which one might be confident would be of interest to a
sizeable audience and sell well, is surely very different from the decision to translate a
text of unknown authorship. This new information helps to explain why Floresta might
have chosen to translate a text which argued a position far beyond the fundamentally
conservative demands for better education and higher social regard for women that
characterise her own work.
However, the significance of Gardeton’s 1826 ‘missing link’ does not end there.
Of far greater importance in the context of this article is the fact that, while definitively
confirming Direitos’s status as a direct translation of an entirely different text, by a
peculiar irony this new link in the chain can in fact be said to resuscitate the epithet
of ‘translator of Wollstonecraft’, although not in the sense that it has been employed
to date. For the truth is that Floresta did indeed translate Wollstonecraft, insofar as she
made the conscious decision to translate and publish a radical defence of sexual equality
which she believed to be the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, and thus to associate her
own name with that of the famous British writer. We must therefore conclude that,
even at the age of twenty-two, Floresta understood Wollstonecraft’s power as a symbol
of discourse on women’s rights.
It is interesting to wonder when, if ever, Floresta realised her mistake. Her 1853
text Opúsculo Humanitário, contains a (passing) reference to ‘Wollstonecraft’, that
is to say, to the maiden name by which the British writer has traditionally been
known.39 This would appear to suggest that Floresta was by then genuinely familiar
with Wollstonecraft’s work, or at the very least more aware of the reception of and
engagement with her ideas among intellectual circles, and was not thinking only of
her own translation of twenty years earlier. It is perhaps significant that Opúsculo
Humanitário, which contains the only mention of the British feminist in all Floresta’s
surviving works, was published following her return from two years spent in Europe,
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72 Gender & History

mostly in Paris, where she is more likely to have encountered genuine translations of
Wollstonecraft’s texts or informed discussions of her ideas.
If Floresta was aware by 1853 that the text she had translated in her youth was not,
in fact, the work of Wollstonecraft, it was far too late to do anything about it. Direitos
had been offered for sale in two important provincial capitals and in Rio de Janeiro,
all more than ten years earlier. The degree to which Floresta had (quite unknowingly,
it is now clear) hoodwinked the Brazilian reading public appears to be illustrated by a
reference to Wollstonecraft in Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s 1844 novel A Moreninha.
Leopoldo, the novel’s hero, makes the following sarcastic comment about Carolina, the
vivacious and spirited ‘little brunette’ of the title: ‘the pretty lady is a philosopher! . . .
imagine that! She’s already read Mary de [sic] Wollstonecraft and, since this latter
defends the rights of women, she grew irritated with me because I requested a sinecure
when she becomes a minister of the State, and a commission as army surgeon in the
event of her attaining the rank of General’.40 The parallel with the radical arguments
to be found in Woman Not Inferior to Man (and therefore in Direitos) – which includes
chapters that set out specifically to prove women’s equal ability to govern and become
military leaders – is surely too obvious to be coincidental. It is hard to believe that the
Wollstonecraft Leopoldo is making fun of here is not in fact César Gardeton’s fictional
‘Mistriss Godwin’, translated in good faith by Nı́sia Floresta. Confirmation of this
conclusion can also be seen in the fact that Leopoldo regains Carolina’s favour when
‘he promised to introduce a women’s rights bill into the provincial assembly should
he ever be elected’.41 This scenario reflects the appeal to Brazil’s university students
made by Floresta in the dedication with which she prefaced her translation, in which
she expresses her hopes that, ‘one day, in a spare moment of [their] elevated ministerial
positions’, these young men ‘will look justly upon the female sex’.42
What this light-hearted reference suggests is that Macedo had not only read
Direitos and knew who ‘Mistriss Godwin’ was, but also expected his readers to share
that knowledge. A Moreninha appeared in Rio at a time when Floresta was running
a successful school for girls in the capital, and only six years after Direitos had first
been put on sale there. It seems very likely that the writer and her translation of ‘Mary
Wollstonecraft’ would indeed have been well known to Rio’s relatively small bourgeois
reading public. If Macedo and his contemporaries believed Direitos to be a translation
of the work of Wollstonecraft, they were by no means alone. A Brazilian translation
of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published only in 2009 and a search for
Wollstonecraft and her work in some of Brazil’s most prestigious libraries – public
and academic – is still likely to bring you to Floresta’s Direitos, sometimes, but not
always, accompanied by the genuine original.43 It would seem that Gardeton’s deceit
has continued to mislead the unsuspecting Brazilian reader for almost 200 years.
In her 1853 text Opúsculo Humanitário, in the passage referred to above, Floresta
sought to distinguish her own goals from those of Mary Wollstonecraft and other
advocates of women’s rights: ‘But let us leave to Wollstonecraft, Condorcet, Sièyés,
Legouvé, etc., the defence of the rights of the female sex. Our task is another, and
one we believe will be more useful to modern society: the education of women’.44
This passing comment contains a veiled criticism of the usefulness of the ideas of
Wollstonecraft and other writers popularly identified with the defence of women’s
rights. It is possible to speculate that this may in part have been a calculated move to
dissociate herself from the radical ideas of the text she had translated in her youth. It
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 Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth 73

is certainly typical of the more conciliatory tone adopted in her own writings as she
sought to win over her traditional and largely male readership.
Such a distinction is, of course, a paradoxical and unsustainable argument and
her discussion elsewhere in Opúsculo Humanitário makes clear that it is nothing more
than a device to reassure her reader. Floresta does not genuinely believe that women’s
education and women’s rights are or can be treated as separate issues. It is interesting
to note that the pragmatic promotion of women’s rights through the implementation
of a rigorous educational system for Brazilian girls, adopted by Floresta in Opúsculo
Humanitário, in fact has much in common with the practical proposals for national co-
education in chapter twelve of the Rights of Woman. Floresta’s lack of acknowledgment
of this philosophical common ground must either be taken as an indication that she was
still not familiar with the content of that text, or – more probably, we would contend –
as further evidence of her recognition and use of Wollstonecraft as a political symbol,
and not an intellectual source, for women’s rights arguments and activism in Brazil.
Here, however, Wollstonecraft becomes the symbol against which Floresta writes in
order to mask her own defence of women’s rights and make her work more acceptable
to the conservative patriarchy.
If Floresta was indeed hoping to distance herself discursively (and perhaps person-
ally) from Wollstonecraft by the 1850s, it was in vain. Her much-lauded association
with that most famous of Enlightenment feminist writers has undoubtedly been in-
strumental in securing Floresta’s place in Brazil’s own feminist canon. It has also,
unfortunately, meant that attention has often been diverted from her own extensive and
valuable body of work. This article presents new evidence that suggests Floresta very
probably believed the text she translated in 1832 to be the work of Wollstonecraft, and
that she herself did not make the decision to identify it as such. It can therefore no
longer be claimed that it was Floresta who chose to make use of the symbolic weight of
Wollstonecraft’s name to attract readers to her translation – this decision must now be
attributed to César Gardeton. Rather, it is now apparent that in choosing to launch her
own writing career with a translation of what was ostensibly Wollstonecraft’s work,
Floresta shows herself to be well aware of, and keen to take advantage of, that symbolic
value in order to establish her own name. What remains unchanged in a consideration
of Direitos is the very significant influence the text has had in establishing the sym-
bolic, political power of Wollstonecraft as a marker of feminist thought and identity
in Brazil and Latin America, while unwittingly preventing, or at least making more
difficult, the actual transmission of Wollstonecraft’s ideas within Brazil.

Wollstonecraft as political symbol in the turn-of-the-century ‘movimiento

feminista’
In 1885, in the small southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, someone with the
elaborate – and quite possibly pseudonymous – name Marie Catfauminges de la Forge
published what must surely be one of the longest and most serious non-academic
accounts of Wollstonecraft and her work ever published in Brazil. This article, which
appeared in six instalments in the liberal newspaper A Regeneração, runs to more
than ninety paragraphs and includes references to and quotations from several of
Wollstonecraft’s texts and a detailed analysis of her arguments, alongside some bio-
graphical information.45
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74 Gender & History

Unlike the references to Wollstonecraft and Rights of Woman that appeared in

succeeding decades, this article does not appear to assume that its readers are familiar
with Wollstonecraft’s name or ideas. More significantly perhaps, while in no way
criticising her political positioning, the author of this piece states that her interest
lies in Wollstonecraft’s ideas about education, explaining the article’s title: ‘Uma
Educadora’.46 In the third instalment the author states that, ‘[a] century, however, has
not yet passed, and the intrepid Englishwoman has already triumphed . . . . If their civil
and political rights are still contested, no-one refuses [women] the right to education’,
going on to note that (internationally) women now receive instruction in and have
shown great ability in the sciences. This observation, and the article as a whole, offers
a determined, if unwitting, retort both to the 1827 comments of the Viscount of Cairu
and to Floresta’s own rhetorical disassociation of Wollstonecraft from the cause of
women’s education discussed above.
What is also of interest here is that the author is extremely selective with regard
to Wollstonecraft’s biography, referring to her loving marriage to Godwin, but making
no reference to her earlier relationship with Imlay or her daughter from that union.
She also stresses on more than one occasion Wollstonecraft’s belief in God, or ‘the
Supreme Being’, and describes her as ‘profoundly deist’.47 The Viscount of Cairu’s
notion of Wollstonecraft’s symbolic value in 1827 is quite clear, and Floresta’s attempt
to distance herself from her English forebear in 1852 suggests that she too was aware
of the negative symbolism attached to her. This article published more than thirty years
later, coincidentally at the very moment that news of Floresta’s death reached Brazil,
is, to our knowledge, the first and perhaps only concerted attempt within Brazil to
rehabilitate Wollstonecraft’s reputation and present her writings in a comprehensively
positive light.48 In this way, this 1885 article paralleled and possibly built on British
Victorian and North American revisionary histories of Godwin and his circle, including
Elizabeth Robin Pennell’s Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Boston, 1884).
At the turn of the twentieth century around the globe, the term ‘feminism’ came
to be used to describe the social movements devoted to specific women’s rights issues,
such as suffrage, or to the general liberation of women from patriarchal oppression.49
Elvira López of Argentina was one of the first authors from the Americas to use the term
‘feminist’ to describe the women’s movements of her homeland and other nations.50
López was also one of the first historians to focus on the international character of
feminism. Submitted to the faculty of ‘filosophı́a y letras’ at the University of Buenos
Aires, her 1901 doctoral dissertation, El Movimiento Feminista, assessed contemporary
debates on women’s issues across Europe, British India, Australia, Africa and Latin
America, with a chapter devoted to Argentina. Lopez traced the historical roots of
international fin-de-siècle feminism, describing ‘Inglaterra’ as the origin of ‘La idea
feminista’. She cited Saint Thomas More, Mary Astell and, with greatest emphasis,
Wollstonecraft as the crucial philosophical moments in the English origins of the now
global idea of feminism.51
Though only discussed twice, Wollstonecraft emerges in the dissertation as the
linchpin in the development of the English and American idea of feminism. Repre-
senting her work as breaking from the querelle des femmes of the early European
Enlightenment and its focus on abstract questions of sex equality, López praised the
concrete, practical, yet revolutionary objectives of Wollstonecraft’s ‘famous Vindi-
cation’ in ‘calling for freedom of sex education and political rights’. She described
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 Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth 75

Wollstonecraft as pitting her philosophical views on women’s rights to a ‘complete

and solid education’ and ‘work and political freedom’ against the retrograde views
of Rousseau. López upheld Wollstonecraft as defending women’s entitlement to the
rights that ‘the [French] Revolution acknowledged as the heritage of all humanity’.
She indicated the radical and visionary quality of Wollstonecraft’s theory of women’s
rights, highlighting her call ‘for free access to a career in medicine and the right to
vote, all of which makes this work truly remarkable and advanced for the time it
was written’. López compared Wollstonecraft’s conception of the sexes’ equal rights
to civil and political liberties to the current ‘English expression of feminism’, which
throughout her dissertation she associated with John Stuart Mill. For her, both Woll-
stonecraft and the current school of English feminism, with all their ‘bold aspirations’,
were ‘not exempt from good sense’. López concluded with an argument about Woll-
stonecraft’s substantial philosophical and political legacies in the United States; her
commonsensical egalitarianism made her views appealing to the ‘religious community
of Quakers’ in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century America, who appropriated this English
feminist school of thought for the arguments of the US abolition and women’s rights
movements.52
Despite this favourable account of Wollstonecraft’s legacies, López’s dissertation
spends more time assessing the influence of John Stuart Mill – whose women’s suf-
frage advocacy in the British Parliament and arguments in The Subjection of Women
were widely discussed and emulated in late nineteenth-century Latin America.53 The
popularity of Mill’s Subjection of Women had helped to reinvigorate international at-
tention to Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman in the 1890s.54 El Movimiento Feminista
demonstrates that López was certainly familiar with the arguments of the Rights of
Woman, like fellow Argentinian and women’s rights advocate Ernesto Quesada.55
A 1913 article in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación, ‘El Movimiento Suf-
fragista’, similarly deployed Wollstonecraft and ‘Inglaterra’ as symbols of the roots
of international feminism. After citing a string of twenty-one countries from Aus-
tralia to Russia to Mexico to Brazil that had active women’s rights movements, the
piece went on to situate ‘Inglaterra’ and its philosopher Wollstonecraft as the origin of
this globalised cause. Although her ‘Vindication’ was ‘controversial’, Wollstonecraft’s
‘ideas were not without supporters’. The article mentioned Wollstonecraft’s reception
by Robert Southey and Sydney Smith, and her general influence on reform of women’s
education. In this and López’s public use of Wollstonecraft, turn-of-the-century Ar-
gentinians encountered a symbolic portrait of Wollstonecraft as an important source
for the international women’s movement, as it had spread from England and Europe, to
the United States and beyond. Because the title of the 1913 article declares its origin as
written from London for the Nation, its Argentinian readers may have read it with an
eye to its British bias. Yet the similarities between the translated ‘El Movimiento Suf-
fragista’ and Lopez’s El Movimiento Feminista suggest the deep cultural connections
between British and Argentinian feminism in this historical moment.56
Two 1918 articles in the Mexican-American newspaper La Prensa engaged Woll-
stonecraft from the perspective of expatriate politics. La Prensa was a Spanish language
newspaper in San Antonio, printed for the substantial, turn-of-the-century Mexican-
American community in Texas. As Rodriguez explains, this community held onto
Mexico as its primary national identity and maintained the patriotic disposition of a
people living in exile rather than the assimilationist culture of immigrants.57 The editor
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76 Gender & History

of the paper at this time, the Mexican-born Ignacio Lozano, sought to educate his
fellow Mexican-American expatriates through excerpts and translations from classics
of European literature, from Balzac to Tolstoy to Shaw.58 La Prensa’s cultural predica-
ment was to stand betwixt and between the European colonising culture, the American
imperial culture and the valorised homeland of Mexico to which its expatriate readers
were not likely to return.
In this context, La Prensa sought to educate its readership about the US women’s
suffrage cause as the state and federal level campaigns gained steam in Texas in 1918.
Texan women were granted the right to vote in state-level primaries and elections in
March 1918. As with the rest of the American South, there was strong opposition
in the all-male legislature to their full enfranchisement at the federal level.59 At this
time, San Antonio was home to a cross-cultural group of female suffragists and their
Mexican-American male supporters who advertised voter registration drives in the
pages of La Prensa in the build-up to the fall primaries.60 During the primary and
election season of 1918, the newspaper published two articles on the history of the
women’s suffrage cause – one with a strong European bias, and the other, Anglo-
American – that each invoked Wollstonecraft in different ways. Their competing uses
of Wollstonecraft illustrate how these pieces framed the issue of women’s suffrage in
Texas and the United States as a culturally foreign yet politically imperative matter for
the Mexican-American community.
On 11 August 1918, La Prensa printed an article with the dramatic title, ‘The
Battle for Women’s Liberty’. Citing the German historian Käthe Schirmacher’s The
Modern Women’s Rights Movement (1905) as a source, the article took a broadly
Continental European perspective on the development of the cause since the birth of
the renaissance querelle des femmes.61 In a section titled, ‘La revolución femenina’,
Wollstonecraft was credited as fanning ‘the embers of latent rebellion’ with the 1792
publication of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Noting, again, that hers was not
‘the first challenge of its kind’, the author acknowledged that Wollstonecraft’s book
‘has come to be regarded as the first classic of female revolt’. Such iconic use of
Wollstonecraft to ground the cause in a particular historical and ideological moment,
the author reflected, was a typical facet of a large social movement. After equating her
achievement to Olympe de Gouges’s 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and
the Citizen, the article disposed of Wollstonecraft to outline the shape of the modern
movement for women’s rights, in France, Britain and the United States.62
Wollstonecraft had the last word, however. The piece concluded with praise for
Wollstonecraft and her Vindication of the Rights of Woman as offering an abstract
proposition that ‘we moderns’ – presumably, the readers of La Prensa – needed to
follow to its logical conclusion. From her idea that ‘women are no less reasonable
than men’, several corollaries follow: ‘there is no essential difference in the under-
standing’ of the sexes, ‘sexual distinctions . . . have been unduly exaggerated’ and
equal education would cause the ‘rapid disappearance’ of ‘superficial distinctions’
between the sexes. Wollstonecraft’s philosophy points to a more humane, egalitarian,
cosmopolitan way of seeing the relationship between the sexes: ‘women are equal par-
ticipants in the human community’, ‘their functions are not limited to having children
and household care’ and they are ‘as capable as men, to perform any work in the vari-
ous branches of global activity’. Displaced from Britain, Europe and even the culture
of the Mexican-American community of Texas, Wollstonecraft becomes an abstract
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 Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth 77

symbol of universal, liberal values that transcend time and place, and unite people
across culture, gender and nationality. As such a global icon of women’s suffrage,
Wollstonecraft could serve as a connector between this liminal community – standing
between the culture of Europe, Mexico and the United States – and the contentious
women’s suffrage cause as it was playing out in Texas.63
In contrast, on 4 November 1918, La Prensa presented an Anglo-centric image of
Wollstonecraft as grounded in the culture of her homeland of Britain, yet superseded
by the latest exemplar of their feminist tradition, John Stuart Mill. Under a dramatic
title like the August piece with the added effect of upper-case type – ‘MILITANT
SUFFRAGISTS IN ENGLAND AND THE UNITED STATES’ – the article opened
with praise for the ‘ingenuity’ of ‘women as propagandists for their rights . . . both in
England and the United States’. The article then questioned the political effectiveness
of such rhetoric and argumentation: ‘If brilliant words and phrases . . . could win a
case, women would have won this long ago’. After doubting the power of the Anglo-
American feminist school of thought that Wollstonecraft’s and Mill’s ideas inspired, the
author still cited them as the two most famous authors on women’s rights: ‘The classic
book on the women’s movement, after and more influential than Mary Wollstonecraft’s,
has been entitled ‘The Subjection of Women’ by John Stuart Mill’.64
The influence of the British and American women’s rights movement on the way
that Wollstonecraft was presented to the Latin American community in Texas is to be
expected. What is surprising is how these two articles, within a few months, present
competing pictures of the same writer and her relationship to the current women’s
suffrage cause. The first upholds Wollstonecraft as a universalistic philosopher of
women’s rights, who made axiomatic claims about the sexes like ‘Euclid’; the second
depicts Wollstonecraft as a historic pioneer whose political rhetoric had been surpassed
in salience by John Stuart Mill’s for the Anglo-American suffragists. In the build-up
to the ratification of the women’s suffrage amendment to the US Constitution in 1920,
American suffragists – led by Carrie Chapman Catt – routinely invoked Mill as a
practical model and Wollstonecraft as a founding philosopher for their cause.65 These
newspaper articles indicate that these broader symbolic trends in the political rhetoric
of US feminism appeared in journalism printed for the Mexican-American community
in Texas. In La Prensa, Wollstonecraft was not invoked in Mexican-American culture,
but rather for the persuasion of its male citizens of the moral value and historic character
of the American women’s suffrage movement.
By the late 1910s and 1920s, it is clear that Wollstonecraft’s name was being used
in a similar way in Brazil – a symbol of the birth of feminist thought, as evidenced in a
number of newspaper articles. Here, too, we sometimes find her name alongside that of
Mill, and other British thinkers and activists, but also frequently with French feminist
writers, reflecting the greater influence of French thought on Brazil’s intellectual
formation (and also perhaps the fact that French was still the more widely-taught
second language at this time). Thus in 1918 we find Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman
being described as the text which ‘energetically initiated’ the promotion of the rights
of women in England, with Mill identified as her successor. However, these are passing
references within a defence of the notion that Condorcet was the first in modern times
to proclaim the equal rights of the sexes systematically.66
A speech given in 1920 in honour of the Belgian-born medical doctor Maria
Renotte, twice cited Wollstonecraft as a philosophical inspiration for Renotte’s social
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78 Gender & History

activism, and identified Wollstonecraft, alongside French Revolutionary appeals for

women’s rights, as the origins of the cause of female emancipation.67 Meanwhile, an
anonymous article from 1923, focused entirely on the British women’s movement,
posed the question ‘when did the feminist ideal begin to appear in Great Britain?’ and
declared that its first manifestation was Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman.68 In 1929,
a federal deputy for Maranhão State named Condorcet and Wollstonecraft the first
theorists of women’s right to suffrage and observed that in 1824 – the date of Brazil’s
first Constitution – such utopian ideas had found no echo in his nation and remained
‘vague rumours’ even in Europe.69 It is interesting to note this rhetoric concerning the
distance between European and Brazilian thought at the time of independence, when
in fact Floresta’s translation was published only eight years later in 1832.
All of the aforesaid early twentieth-century newspaper articles, from Argentina
to Texas to Brazil, reflect a growing trend in the symbolic reception of Wollstonecraft:
she represented the origins of the European women’s movement, which contributed
to the internationalisation of feminism, both in and for Latin America. Roughly coin-
ciding with the apex of this trend was Roberto Seidl’s 1933 introduction into modern
scholarship of the myth of Floresta’s translation of Wollstonecraft more than a century
earlier. The Floresta-Wollstonecraft myth became part of academic history at precisely
the moment in which Wollstonecraft’s symbolic cachet and the international women’s
suffrage movement reached peak power in Brazil, with women’s suffrage granted there
at the national level in 1932.

Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft myth within international feminist

history
Three factors in Wollstonecraft’s reception in the long nineteenth century converged to
make her a political symbol of the international feminist cause across Latin America,
especially as shown in our primary national case of Brazil but also in our com-
parative regional points of reference, Buenos Aires and San Antonio. First, because
of the overlap of the scandal of Godwin’s Memoirs with anti-revolutionary politics,
she quickly became both the most infamous and the most famous women’s rights ad-
vocate in the world. In the Americas, late 1790s rumours about her sexual, political and
religious radicalism led to the use of Wollstonecraft as a political symbol of the exotic
and even dangerous cause of women’s rights, as shown in Brazilian senate debates
over female education in 1827. Second, Floresta was drawn to and benefited from
the symbolic cachet of Wollstonecraft’s name in three 1830s editions of her Direitos,
the first book-length feminist publication in Brazil, even though the text was actually
a translation of another Enlightenment work on the woman question. Through this
public invocation of ‘Mistriss Godwin’ and the apparently unwitting misattribution
of the translated text to her, Floresta sparked the myth of Wollstonecraft as a literary
foundation for Brazilian feminism. Third, Wollstonecraft was often used as a symbol
of the international or universal character of the women’s rights cause in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, including in some regions of Latin America. This
fact, combined with the myth of Wollstonecraft’s early and influential translation in
Brazil, has led modern scholarship to assume the long-standing philosophical or liter-
ary influence of Wollstonecraft on Latin American feminism, without real evidence to
support it.
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 Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth 79

In light of the discovery of further evidence confirming Floresta’s translation of a

tract from the European querelle des femmes that considerably predates the Rights of
Woman, Wollstonecraft’s legacies for Latin America in the long nineteenth century, thus
far, have been shown to be primarily symbolic. She has been shown to be not so much
an intellectual presence in nineteenth-century Latin American cultures, but rather a
symbol that (local and foreign) intellectuals used for situating Latin American feminism
in relation to the European and Anglo-American feminist traditions. The colonial,
postcolonial and international politics behind her symbolic and even mythological
uses for Latin American feminism is arguably more interesting than the original myth
of her translation into Brazilian Portuguese. As the August 1918 La Prensa article
on ‘The Battle for Women’s Liberty’ argued, such myths are sociological necessities
in any ‘large movement’ like feminism.70 Wollstonecraft, as a widely recognisable
political icon, gave feminism – as it emerged as an organised, international and, to
some degree, transnational movement in fin de siècle Latin America and elsewhere –
a sense of history, purpose and ideological common ground. Yet the enduring myth
of Floresta’s translation of Wollstonecraft only exacerbates the colonial view of Latin
America’s women’s movements as somehow secondary to the European texts they
engaged. While Floresta’s own transatlantic career shows how Latin American and
European feminisms cross-fertilised each other as they evolved in the long nineteenth
century, such intellectual confluences would be better understood through the metaphor
of conversation than translation.
The study of Wollstonecraft’s use as a political symbol for Latin American fem-
inism shows her role as a cross-cultural icon as much as it underscores the legacies
of European colonialism for historical scholarship. Both Wollstonecraft scholars and
historians of feminism have invoked Wollstonecraft’s intellectual relevance for Latin
America, to the point of accepting long-standing misinformation about her legacies
in Cuba and Brazil. Claire Tomalin went so far in her award-winning biography of
Wollstonecraft as to imagine wishfully that her relatives grew up in Cuba and became
involved in the revolution there, connecting her Enlightenment politics with the so-
cialism of Castro.71 Yet, contrary to the speculations and assertions of biographers
dating to 1834, we have no evidence that Nancy Kingsbury Wollstonecraft of New
Hampshire, the wife of Wollstonecraft’s brother Charles, had offspring who lived in
Cuba, or that she spread ideas of women’s rights in the context of the growing abolition
and independence movements on the island while she lived there in the 1820s in an
artist colony for convalescents.72
Other scholars have been less reckless in their acceptance of the myth of Woll-
stonecraft’s legacies in Latin America, but have nonetheless repeated the tale of Flo-
resta’s translation of the Rights of Woman to shore up the ideological and political links
between European and Latin American feminisms.73 For example, Francesca Miller
drew the sociological parallels between Wollstonecraft’s ‘vindication’ of the rights
of women, the poor and the middle class against the aristocratic class system in late
eighteenth-century Britain, and the late twentieth-century Latin American ‘politics of
reivindicación’ concerning women’s and indigenous people’s land rights, then refer-
enced Floresta’s Direitos as evidence that Wollstonecraft would have had strong intel-
lectual influence in Latin American politics by the mid-nineteenth century.74 Miller’s
cross-cultural comparisons of Wollstonecraft’s political thought and contemporary
land rights movements in Latin America are valuable in themselves; they can stand on
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80 Gender & History

their own, without the myth of Wollstonecraft’s translation by Floresta. Like Davies,
Brewster and Owen, we believe that scholarship on Latin American feminism will
only be enhanced by the rejection of the persistent myth of Wollstonecraft’s translation
by Floresta in 1830s Brazil.75 In casting away this myth, we open our eyes to new
paths of scholarly exploration: the colonial, European and western canonical biases in
the history of women and gender; the international character of feminism as a set of
ideologies and political practices; the role of culturally-inflected and gendered political
symbolism in the creation of social movements; the often neglected history of Latin
American writings and activism and the possibility of finding further philosophical
and literary legacies of Wollstonecraft for her sisters fighting for social justice for the
poor and oppressed in Latin America.

Notes
1. See e.g., Roberto Seidl, Nisia Floresta, 1810–1885 (Rio de Janeiro: [n. p.], 1933), p. 9; Adauto da Câmara,
Historia de Nı́sia Floresta (1941; 2nd edn, repr. Natal: Departamento Estadual de Imprensa, 1997), p. 57;
J. J. Barreto, ‘Precursora da emancipação feminina no Brasil: Nı́sia Floresta – (1885–1985)’, O Poti, 26
May 1985; Constância Lima Duarte, Nı́sia Floresta: Vida e obra (Natal: Editora da Universidade Federal
do Rio Grande do Norte, 1995), p. 167.
2. See e.g., June E. Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women’s Rights in Brazil,
1850–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 14; Francesca Miller, Latin American Women
and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991), pp. 42, 277 n. 38;
Evelyn Picon Garfield and Iván A. Schulman, Contextos: Literatura y sociedad latinoamericanas del
siglo XIX (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 10–11; Elizabeth A. Marchant, Critical Acts:
Latin American Women and Cultural Criticism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), p. 109;
Verónica Schlid, ‘Transnational Links in the Making of Latin American Feminisms’, in Alena Heitlinger
(ed.), Émigré Feminism: Transnational Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp.
67–94, here p. 89 n. 5; Christina Ferreira Pinto, Gender, Discourse, and Desire in Twentieth-Century
Brazilian Women’s Literature (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2004), p. x; Renata Wasserman,
Central at the Margin: Five Brazilian Women (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), p. 160.
On Wollstonecraft’s canonisation, see Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political
Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 280–301; Barbara
Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 246–53.
3. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, ‘A Mary Wollstonecraft que o Brasil conheceu, ou a travessura literária de
Nı́sia Floresta’, in Nı́sia Floresta, O Carapuceiro e outros ensaios de tradução cultural (São Paulo: Editora
Hucitec, 1996), pp. 167–92. See also Charlotte Hammond Matthews, ‘Between “Founding Text” and
“Literary” Prank: Reasoning the Roots of Nı́sia Floresta’s Direitos das mulheres e injustiça dos homens’,
Ellipsis 8 (2010), pp. 9–36.
4. Martyn P. Thompson, ‘Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical Meaning’, History and Theory
32 (1993), pp. 248–72, see esp. pp. 251–2, 266–7.
5. Karen Offen, European Feminisms: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp.
19–20; Karen Offen, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Karen Offen (ed.), Globalizing Feminisms, 1789–1945
(London: Routledge, 2010), pp. xxix–xxxvi.
6. David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), pp. 17–32.
7. Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadel-
phia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 38–50; Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder:
The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Penguin, 2007), pp. 80–83; Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Back-
lash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2007), pp. 40–47.
8. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 118–34.
9. Eileen Hunt Botting, ‘Wollstonecraft in Europe, 1792–1904: A Revisionist Reception History’, History of
European Ideas 39 (2013), pp. 503–27.

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 Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth 81

10. Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice, pp. 42, 277 n. 38; Schlid, ‘Transnational
Links in the Making of Latin American Feminisms’, p. 89 n. 5.
11. Catherine Davies, ‘Introduction’, in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga, Sab, ed. Catherine Davies
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 1–28, here p. 17; Eileen Hunt Botting and Christine
Carey, ‘Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advo-
cates’, American Journal of Political Science 48 (2004), pp. 707–22; Kathryn Kish Sklar and James
Brewer Stewart, ‘Introduction’, in Kish Sklar and Brewer Stewart (eds), Women’s Rights and Transatlantic
Anti-Slavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. xi–xxiv.
12. Regina M. Janes, ‘On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’,
Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978), pp. 293–302; Chandos Michael Brown, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft,
or the Female Illuminati: The Campaign against Women and “Modern Philosophy” in the Early Republic’,
Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995), pp. 389–424; Botting, ‘Wollstonecraft in Europe’, pp. 503–27.
13. Elvira Lopez, El Movimiento Feminista (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1901), pp. 168,
206.
14. Examples of the first myth include, Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain,
France and the United States, 1780–1860 (New York: Schocken, 1984), p. 33; Alice Browne, The
Eighteenth-Century Feminist Mind (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), p. 172; G. J. Barker-
Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 368–95; Barbara Caine, English Feminism, 1780–1980 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), p. 40; Cora Kaplan, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reception and Legacies’, in Claudia
Johnson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), pp. 246–70, here p. 249. For the second myth, see e.g., Seidl, Nisia Floresta, 1810–1885,
p. 9; da Câmara, Historia de Nı́sia Floresta, p. 57; Barreto, ‘Precursora da emancipação feminina no
Brasil’; Duarte, Nı́sia Floresta: Vida e Obra, p. 167.
15. Davies, ‘Introduction’, in Sab, p. 17.
16. Jane Herrick, ‘The Reluctant Revolutionist: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hipólito da Costa’, The
Americas 7 (1950), pp. 171–81, esp. pp. 171–2.
17. Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames, pp. 37–51.
18. On the connections and differences between the earlier European querelle des femmes (including the work of
Barre and ‘Sophia’) and the post-French Revolutionary discourse on women’s rights (such as by Condorcet
and Wollstonecraft), see Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Englishwoman’, in
Barbara Kanner (ed.), The Women of England from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present (Hamden: Archon
Books, 1979), pp. 183–228, esp. pp. 201–3; Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and
the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Offen, European Feminisms, pp. 27–
76; Offen, ‘“Was Mary Wollstonecraft a Feminist?” A Comparative Re-Reading of A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, 1792–1992’, in Offen (ed.), Globalizing Feminisms, pp. 5–17; Sarah Knott and Barbara
Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Sarah Gwyneth
Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2009).
19. Brown, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, or the Female Illuminati’, pp. 389–424.
20. Brown, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, or the Female Illuminati’, pp. 389–424.
21. Botting and Carey, ‘Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact’, pp. 707–22.
22. Hipólito José da Costa, Diário da minha viagem para Filadélfia (1798–1799), Edições do Senado Federal,
vol. 33 (Brasilia: Senado Federal, 2004), p. 127.
23. Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, p. 6.
24. José da Silva Lisboa, Viscount of Cairu, quoted in Diário da Câmara dos Senadores do Império do Brasil,
30 August 1827, p. 533.
25. The full text of the Law of 15 October 1827, including the final wording of Article 12 debated in
the Senate on 30 August, can be read at <http://www.histedbr.fae.unicamp.br/navegando/fontes_escritas/
3_Imperio/lei%2015-10-1827%20lei%20do%20ensino%20de%20primeiras%20letras.htm>.
26. See the Marquis of Santo Amaro’s speech, in Diário da Câmara dos Senadores do Império do Brasil, 29
August 1827, p. 523.
27. Heleieth Saffioti, Women in Class Society, tr. Michael Vale (New York and London: Monthly Review Press,
1978), pp. 161–2. For a discussion of female education in Imperial Brazil, see also Hahner, Emancipating
the Female Sex, pp. 47–8; Fundação Carlos Chagas, Mulher Brasileira – Bibliografia Anotada, vol. 2 (São
Paulo: Brasiliense, 1981), pp. 213–8; Tirsa Regazzini Peres, ‘Educação Brasileira no Império’, História da
Educação, <http://www.acervodigital.unesp.br/bitstream/123456789/105/3/01d06t03.pdf>.

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82 Gender & History

28. For a full account of Floresta’s biography and her own reputation as a ‘sinful woman’, which persisted in
the town of her birth until the 1970s, see Duarte, Nı́sia Floresta: Vida e Obra, pp. 16–74.
29. Roberto Seidl (Nisia Floresta, 1810–1885, p. 9) first made this claim in 1933, but many others have echoed
it since.
30. Constância L. Duarte, ‘Foreword’, in Nı́sia Floresta Brasileira Augusta, Direitos das mulheres e injustiça
dos homens (1832; 4th edn, São Paulo: Cortez, 1989), p. 19.
31. Duarte, ‘Posfácio: Nos primórdios do feminismo brasileiro’, in Direitos, pp. 97–134, esp. pp. 107–8.
32. Pallares-Burke, ‘A Mary Wollstonecraft que o Brasil conheceu’. A brief article by Pallares-Burke publicis-
ing this discovery first appeared in the Caderno Mais of the Folha de São Paulo, 10 September 1995. It is
also interesting to note that the text by ‘Sophia’ borrowed extensively and without credit from De l’Égalité
des deux sexes, a Cartesian defence of the absolute equality of the sexes published in Paris in 1673 by
François Poulain de la Barre.
33. See Hammond Matthews, ‘Between “Founding Text” and “Literary Prank”’, pp. 16–19 for a close compar-
ison of the English original with both Direitos and this intermediary French translation. It should be noted
for the purposes of this article that the differences among the three texts are minimal.
34. Recent scholarship which sees the Direitos as an original text inspired by the Vindication, includes,
Raquel Martins Borges Carvalho Araújo, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft e Nı́sia Floresta: diálogos feministas’,
Revista Água Viva 1, 2010, <http://www.red.unb.br/index.php/aguaviva/article/view/3295>; Simone Ac-
corsi, ‘Nisia Floresta, transgresión y rebeldia en el siglo XIX’, Revista Poligramas 33 (2010), pp. 167–77,
here p. 170. See also Hammond Matthews, ‘Between “Founding Text” and “Literary Prank”’ for a more
detailed discussion of the very limited reception of Pallares-Burke’s research. In a recent article (‘O livro
Direitos das mulheres e injustiça dos homens de Nı́sia Floresta: literatura, mulheres e o Brasil do século
XIX’, História (São Paulo) 30 (2011), pp. 196–213), Isabel Candeloro Campoi reiterates that Direitos is a
translation of Woman not Inferior to Man, citing Pallares-Burke, and rightly concludes that the publication
of Direitos contributed to the identification of Wollstonecraft’s name with the defence of women’s rights in
Brazil (see esp. pp. 198–9, 211), yet misleadingly suggests that Floresta’s first publication was an original
work that responded to Wollstonecraft (see esp. pp. 207, 210).
35. Pallares-Burke, ‘A Mary Wollstonecraft que o Brasil conheceu’, pp. 185–6.
36. Hammond Matthews, ‘Between “Founding Text” and “Literary Prank”’, p. 27.
37. César Gardeton, Les Droits des Femmes, et l’Injustice des Hommes; par Mistriss Godwin. Traduit librement
de l’Anglais, sur la huitième edition (Paris: L. F. Hivert, 1826). An 1822 publication attributed to Gardeton,
Le Triomphe des Femmes (Paris: Delaunay), is a straightforward plagiarism of a text of the same title
published in Paris in 1700 by C. M. D. Noël.
38. See e.g., Pallares-Burke, ‘A Mary Wollstonecraft que o Brasil conheceu’, p. 189; Hammond Matthews,
‘Between “Founding Text” and “Literary Prank”’, p. 21.
39. Nı́sia Floresta, Opúsculo Humanitário, ed. Peggy Sharpe-Valadares (1853; 2nd edn, São Paulo: Editora
Cortez, 1989), p. 29. See below for a further discussion of this reference to Wollstonecraft.
40. J. M. de Macedo, A Moreninha (1844; 34th edn, São Paulo: Editora Ática, 2001), p. 69.
41. Quoted in Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex, p. 15.
42. Floresta, Direitos, p. 22; Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex, p. 66.
43. Ivania Pocinho Motta, A importância de ser Mary: Análise e tradução do livro A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman de Mary Wollstonecraft (São Paulo: Annablume, 2009).
44. Floresta, Opúsculo Humanitário, 2nd edn, p. 29.
45. Marie Catfauminges de la Forge, ‘Uma Educadora’, A Regeneração, Santa Catarina, 26 May 1885, p. 2;
27 May 1885, p. 2; 28 May 1885, p. 2; 29 May 1885, pp. 2–3; 2 June 1885, pp. 2–3; 4 June 1885, pp. 2–3.
46. De la Forge, ‘Uma Educadora’, 26 May 1885, p. 2.
47. De la Forge, ‘Uma Educadora’, 27 May 1885, p. 2.
48. The first of various obituaries published in the Rio press appeared on 25 May 1885 in the Gazeta da Tarde,
p. 3.
49. Offen, European Feminisms, pp. 19–20; Offen (ed.), Globalizing Feminisms, pp. xxix–xxxiv.
50. Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 34.
51. Elvira López, El Movimiento Feminista (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1901), pp. 13–14,
168, 206.
52. López, El Movimiento Feminista, p. 168.
53. López, El Movimiento Feminista, pp. 35–48; Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change, pp. 16, 32,
199.

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 Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth 83

54. Marı́a Patricia Fernández Kelly, ‘Making Sense of Gender in the World Economy: Focus on Latin America’,
Organization 1, 1 October 1994, pp. 341–4.
55. Francine Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern
Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 85.
56. ‘El Movimiento Sufragista’, La Nación (Buenos Aires), vol. 43, iss. 15101, 22 June 1913, p. 6.
57. América Rodriguez, Making Latino News: Race, Language, Class (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999),
p. 17.
58. Rodriguez, Making Latino News, p. 17.
59. Kelley M. King, Call Her a Citizen: Progressive-Era Activist and Educator Anna Pennybacker (College
Station: Texas A&M Press, 2010), p. 143.
60. King, Call Her a Citizen, p. 143.
61. ‘Batalla por la libertad de la mujer’, La Prensa (San Antonio), 11 August 1918, p. 11.
62. ‘Batalla por la libertad de la mujer’, p. 11.
63. ‘Batalla por la libertad de la mujer’, p. 11.
64. ‘SUFRAGISTAS MILITANTES EN INGLATERRA Y ESTADOS UNIDOS’, La Prensa (San Antonio),
4 November 1918, p. 5.
65. Robert Booth Fowler, Carrie Chapman Catt: Feminist Politician (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1986), p. 131.
66. Myrthes de Campos, ‘Em resposta ao Dr Celso Vieira’, O Paiz (Rio de Janeiro), 16 April 1918, p. 2.
Myrthes de Campos was the first woman to practice law in Brazil, and a well-known champion of women’s
emancipation.
67. Maria Lucia Mott, ‘Gênero, medicina, e filantropia: Maria Rennotte e as mulheres na construção da nação’,
cadernos pagu (24), January–June 2005, pp. 41–67. Speech recorded in, ‘Cruz Vermelha Brasileira’, O
Estado de São Paulo, vol. 46, iss. 15239, 28 September 1920, p. 4.
68. Anon., ‘O Feminismo Britanico’, O Paiz (Rio de Janeiro), 18 November 1923, p. 7.
69. Clodomir Cardoso, ‘O voto feminino em face da Constituição brasileira’, Pacotilha (São Luı́s), 12 January
1929, p. 1.
70. ‘Batalla por la libertad de la mujer’, p. 11.
71. Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974; London: Penguin, 1992), p. 317. See
also Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p.
517; Samuel L. Knapp, Female Biography: Containing Notices of Distinguished Women, in Different Ages
and Nations (New York: J. Carpenter, 1834), p. 477; W. Clark Durant (ed.), ‘Supplement to Memoirs of
Mary Wollstonecraft’, in William Godwin, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Haskell, 1927),
pp. 205–6.
72. Wayne Bodle, ‘Wollstonecraft(s) in America, 1792–1870s’, Australia and New Zealand American Studies
Association Meeting unpublished paper (2008).
73. See e.g., Schlid, ‘Transnational Links in the Making of Latin American Feminisms’, p. 89 n. 5; Leilah
Landim, ‘Women and Philanthropy in Brazil: An Overview’, in Kathleen D. McCarthy (ed.), Women,
Philanthropy, and Civil Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 65–107, esp. pp. 79–
80; Marı́a Claudia André and Eva Paulino Bueno (eds), ‘Floresta, Nı́sia’, in Latin American Women Writers:
An Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 181–2.
74. Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice, pp. 42, 277 n. 38.
75. Catherine Davies, Claire Brewster and Hilary Owen (eds), South American Independence: Gender, Politics,
Text (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), pp. 17, 29, 235.

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