page_title: Women's rights in Brazil
section_title: Suffrage movement
hierarchical_section_title: Women's rights in Brazil / Suffrage movement
caption_attribution_description: English: Brazilian zoologist and feminist Bertha Lutz (1894-1976)
context_page_description: Women's societal roles in Brazil have been heavily impacted by the patriarchal traditions of Iberian culture, which holds women subordinate to men in familial and community relationships. The Iberian Peninsula, which is made up of Spain, Portugal and Andorra, has traditionally been the cultural and military frontier between Christianity and Islam, developing a strong tradition for military conquest and male dominance. Patriarchal traditions were readily transferred from the Iberian Peninsula to Latin America through the encomienda system that fostered economic dependence among women and indigenous peoples in Brazil. As the largest Roman Catholic nation in the world, religion has also had a significant impact on the perception of women in Brazil, though over the past century the Brazilian government has increasingly broken with the Catholic Church in regard to issues related to reproductive rights.
  Brazil is thought to possess the most organized and effective women's movement in Latin America, with visible gains having been made over the past century to promote and protect the legal and political rights of women.
context_section_description: Women in Brazil were granted the right to vote in 1932. Though a feminist movement had existed in Brazil since the mid-nineteenth century and women did petition for suffrage to be included in the 1891 Republican Constitution, the drive towards enfranchisement only began in earnest under the leadership of feminist, biologist and lawyer, Bertha Lutz. Following the publication of an article in leading Brazilian newspaper Revista da Semana,  which called upon women to prove their worthiness to men through their achievements and organize in order to demand the right to vote, various women's organizations appeared.
  Lutz founded her own organization in conjunction with American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt in 1922, the Brazilian Federation for the Advancement of Women, which would become the leading suffrage organization of Brazil and was affiliated with the International Women's Suffrage Alliance. Brazilian suffragettes were literate, professional women who made up only a small percentage of the female population in Brazil, the latter which remained largely illiterate. Hence, the campaign for suffrage was by no means a mass movement, and was decidedly moderate in nature. The conservative character of the suffrage movement provoked little resistance from government, and suffrage was declared by Getúlio Vargas in 1932 and later confirmed in the 1934 Constitution.
  Two years after women's suffrage was declared in the 5th Constitution of Brazil, two women were elected to Congress, ten females were elected mayors and assemblywomen, and thirty women were made councilwomen in Brazil. Though government jobs had been available to women in the past, women had not held electoral positions until after suffrage was won and the number of women in government continued to grow throughout the twentieth century.
caption: Bertha Lutz in 1925, leading figure of the feminist movement in Brazil
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