Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914-1940

Susan K. Besse broadens our understanding of the political by establishing the relevance of gender for the construction of state hegemony in Brazil after World War I. Restructuring Patriarchy demonstrates that the consolidation and legitimization of power by President Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo depended to a large extent on the reorganization of social relations in the private sphere. New expectations and patterns of behavior for women emerged in postwar Brazil from heated debates between...