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Title: In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil by Sueann Caulfield ISBN: 0-8223-2398-2 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: February, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Honest brides and deflowered donzellas
Comment: "How could I think to marry an honest man if I do not keep my virginity until the wedding?" "You should find a lighter skin husband for the good of the children that will come. Otherwise, they would be subjects of discrimination, and they would unnecessarily suffer for your mistake..." I remember these debates as part of the everyday conversation of the teenagers when I studied in a Peruvian middle class Catholic school ten years ago. A Peruvian talk-show presented some young adult males who tried to explain that their teenager girl-friends got pregnant because they asked them for what they called "prueba del amor", that is having intercourse as a proof of the chastity of the girl. However, because of these girls seemed to be non-virgins they would not honor their promise marriage. Some elements from an old discourse of family honor based on women chastity remains these days in the mentality of many Latin American women and men. Sueann Caulfield in her recently published book In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century Brazil is concerned with the importance given for different classes to women's chastity as the basis of the family honor and the notions of an "honorable" marriage, in Brazil between post World War I period and 1940s. In those terms, the author make an effort to trace the history of women's place in society to understand the ways in which gender roles are constructed in terms of power relationships related to the state, the law, and the nationhood discourse. Focusing on the cariocas urban lower classes, Sueann Caulfield is concerned with the adoption of these debates about marriage and women's respectability into the working class values and the personal responses to this norms in the everyday life practices. Caulfield focuses on the crime of deflowering -extramarital sex with an "honest virgin" woman between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one-, analyze the relationship between "the role of sexual honor in everyday personal choices and conflicts of people...and its role in public debates over the modernization of the Brazilian nation" (Caulfield, 4). This relationship takes place in the context of a national discourse that identifies the family as the basis of the nation and the sexual honor as the basis of the family. The notion of "honest women" as a juridical subject is central in this discussion to teach the population "civilized" behavioral norms and moral values, as part of a discourse of sexual honor that is "used to reinforce hierarchical relations based not only on gender but on race and class as well" (Cauldfield, 4). For Caulfield, it bring us an example of how the elite build a discourse of national identity through the construction of gender roles imposed to the lower classes to control them, even though this class adapted the discourse to their realities, possibilities and prerogatives. Virginity, the base of the sexual honor, or to be more precise the lost of the virginity is throughout the book used by different women and families as a tool to claim their honorability, and in most cases gain a marriage proposal with a desirable partner. Nonetheless, the possibilities of the lower class to behave under the bourgeois norms of propriety for women were simply limited beginning with their necessity to go to work and the meaning of this in terms of presence in the public space. If middle and upper class daughters were not allowed to go out without the company of a chaperone, working-class women going out alone to go to work, gave them the opportunity of social interaction and courting on the street or in public plazas. Another important aspect is the possibility and necessity of marriage to be considered an "honorable woman" among the working-class population. Traditionally formal marriage was usually beyond the economic and social possibilities of the lower classes, because of the variety of legal documents necessary to perform it and the indirect economic cost that it represent. However, even when it seems a desirable aspiration for most of the women involve in this defloration trials, women and men assume that "honorable women" not necessarily have to be legally married. In my opinion, one of the most important aspects analyzed by Caulfield is the absence of race and class discourse to refute the charge of deflowering among the accused men. Nonetheless the absence of references coexisted with a very racialize discourse among "middle- and upper-class white men that saw black and especially mulatto women as sensual and easily accessible, in contrast to the chaste white women they would marry" (Caulfield, 152). A racialized discourse that probably could ever be more beautifully portrayed than in Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado. In that sense, it is necessary to remark the perfect equilibrium get by Susan Caulfield using gender, class and race as tools of analysis of the sexual honor among the carioca society. Analyze these deflowering cases gives Caulfield the opportunity to show tendencies to endogamic racial marriages, and how a discourse of racial democracy made class boundaries more rigid.
Through this dedicated study Sueann Caulfield shows us how gender and class are mutually complementary to understand political and social constructions as law, state power and nationhood, illuminating the links between gender and power relationships.
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Title: The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories by Emilia Viotti Da Costa, Emilia Viotti Da Costa ISBN: 0807848409 Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864-1945 (Latin America Otherwise) by Peter M. Beattie ISBN: 0822327430 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: November, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era by Elaine Tyler May ISBN: 0465030556 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: November, 1999 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 (American Encounters/Global Interactions) by Eileen J. Suarez Findlay ISBN: 0822323966 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: March, 2000 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Latin American Readers) by Robert M. Levine, John J. Crocitti ISBN: 0822322900 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: August, 1999 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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