Conclusion

Summary

Through the course of this study I have highlighted and challenged some of the more mythical, idealised and monolithic constructions of Nísia Floresta and her work which still abound in Brazilian studies of the writer, particularly as regards her recuperation by liberal feminist scholars over the last two decades. Floresta's reputation and her position within the canon is inevitably founded first and foremost on her writings about women and her considerable contribution to the emergence of feminist discourse in Brazil. The starting point for any re-evaluation of that position can therefore only be her first publication, Direitos, and its exposure as a direct translation of Sophia's Woman Not Inferior to Man. As I have discussed, it is the early date and, more importantly, the radical content of this text that have done most to earn Floresta her reputation as Brazil's first feminist, and the fact that it is not the ‘free translation’ it was thought to be means that Floresta can no longer be credited with the arguments found in Direitos, nor can her name be linked with the powerful feminist associations of Mary Wollstonecraft. However, Floresta's translation offers a valuable insight into her thinking at that early time, and it remains an extremely significant moment in the development of Brazilian feminism. If no longer its ‘texto fundante’, it is undoubtedly its rallying cry, and we can be almost certain that it had a considerable influence on de Barandas's writing, and perhaps on other women writers in the years that followed.