"Foi obra do homem na sua sabedoria infinita": o Direito segundo Josephina Álvares de Azevedo, Maria Lacerda de Moura e Myrthes de Campos (1888-1937)

Abstract

Starting from the conception of legal history as the history of normative knowledge and understanding patriarchy as a historical regime of normativity, this research sought to rescue the memory and the intellectual production of women who questioned the law in its patriarchal dimension, in order to appreciate other perspectives (in addition to the masculine-hegemonic one) of the legal phenomena that affected them in some way. Three women (Josephina Álvares de Azevedo, journalist; Maria Lacerda de Moura, educator; and Myrthes Gomes de Campos, the first female lawyer), who wrote critically about Law in non-fiction texts, were selected, based on the period when they wrote, in their political positions and in their volume of production. Their perceptions about the Law of their time and about the relations between the sexes are presented and analyzed, as well as the objects of their criticism, going through themes such as voting, marriage, divorce, the incapacity of married women, prostitution and the feminist movement, contextualizing them with the aid of historiography. In the conclusion, their positions and strategies are compared in their similarities and differences, pointing out where they met and the limits of their criticisms, in addition to presenting possibilities for expanding the present work, seen as a potential beginning of a genealogy of a female/feminist normative knowledge.