Interdicted and unheard: writings of women in the norte-rio-grandense press (1914-1934)
women's writing, literature, press, female emancipation.
The objective of this study is to analyze the writings of Potiguar women in the press ofthe Rio Grande do Norte, between the years 1914 and 1934. We define women's writing(écriture féminine) as not simply the women’s talking, but writings that have beenmarginalized, dissident, transgressive. During the end of the 19th century and the firstdecades of the 20th century, the norte-rio-grandense intellectual movement intensified,mainly because of the emergence of newspapers and magazines that carried literature intheir pages. More than books, the periodical press was the first vehicle of female literaryproduction, educated women who wrote poetry, riddles, essays, articles, literarycriticism, among other literary genres. In newspapers and magazines, Potiguar womenwriters published, through their writings, women's issues, called topics about femaleemancipation, that is, subjects that approached women's education, women'sprofessionalization, and women's suffrage. Situating our work in the field of women'ssocial and cultural history, we work with a variety of sources: newspapers, magazines,memoirs, and literary works produced by women. We questioned ourselves about whothese Potiguar women writers were, how the genre crossed their writing practice in RioGrande do Norte, about the articulations built by these women among themselves andwith other social segments of their times, about their relations with the public spaces ofthe cities, in sum, about the mechanisms of a transgressive insertion in the intellectualfield of Rio Grande do Norte.