Dialogues of the “weaker sex”: meanings of women’s letters in the newspaper A Matutina Meiapontense (1830-1834)

Abstract

The paper focuses on the letters and respective meanings and
dialogues established by two women who were part of the community of readers of the newspaper A Matutina Meiapontense, the first periodical printed in the Center-West of Brazil that circulated between 1830 and 1834: Rosseira Zellosa and A Apaixonada. Among other themes, the reader-writers questioned instituted powers, and especially the place of women in discursive constructions that are revealing of the plots and the genre dramas present in the nineteenth century Goiás Province. The main theoretical-methodological body dialogues with Cultural Studies in a qualitative approach based on cultural analysis as a methodological instrument and bibliographic survey, documentary research and narrative analysis as data collection and treatment tools. The final considerations point to the dramatic situation of the goiana women in the early nineteenth century, relegated to the shadows of an eminently patriarchal social, cultural and political structure.