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Modernization and the Women of Brazil
| Article
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18585 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
2,200 Words |
| Author
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Bernard C. Rosen
Bernard C. Rosen is professor of sociology at Cornell
University and author of The Industrial Connection and Women,
Work, and Achievement. He has conducted research in Brazil for
a number of years. |
Marie Barboso, single, twenty-one, and poor, is an achiever. Bored with rural life, fed up with bad pay and miserable working conditions, she left the plantation on which she had been born and moved to Americana, a medium-size industrial city in south-central Brazil. In the city she holds a job in a textile mill as a machine operator and makes far more money tending a clangorous, throbbing loom than she had ever earned from hoeing, weeding, and picking coffee beans. Ambitious to get ahead, Marie goes to school at night; the schools in Americana run evening classes especially to accommodate young working men and women. Slowly and painfully, Maria is pulling herself out of the peasant class to which her parents still belong.
Living and working in Americana, she became part of a modern industrial society, an exciting and hectic world. But more than a change in location and work was involved in the move to Americana. For in changing her milieu, she changed herself. Looking about her, comparing notes with peers, she discovered a modern world that applauds individualism and competition, that rewards achievers with prestige and money, and that promotes a value system diametrically opposed to the traditional system of her village home. Drawing courage from her friends, she broke with the way of life her parents had tried to impose on her. The traditional female role is not for her. She does not want to be a full-time homemaker, passive and obedient to the wishes of her husband. Maria wants a family, but she wants to work too. She is, and plans to remain after marriage, an independent and assertive woman.
Maria's fiancé does not object to her independent behavior. A young and ambitious bookkeeper (a remarkable catch for a girl of Maria's background), he is taking courses in business administration at a local school and wants a modern wife, not a traditional dona da casa (house-wife) whose skills are exclusively domestic. Maria and her fiancé look forward to a marriage more democratic than their parents have known--or even dreamed of.
Migration to the City
Most rural migrants move to the city in search of jobs and other opportunities. Fortunately, many jobs are being created by the rapid modernization that is changing the face of the country, dotting the landscape with cities crowded with shops, mills, and factories. Curiously, the news of Brazil's modernization has reached relatively few ears in the United States. Americans tend to think of Brazil--if they think of it at all--as a distant, exotic land populated with carnival revelers, naked
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