Women, Politics and Graphic Humor in the Press of the Early 20th Century: A Brief Look at the Brazilian Case

Abstract

This article addresses the representation and presence of women in the graphic humor of the Brazilian press in the early 20th century. We take three distinct examples as the main sources of the analysis: the caricatures of women made by the artist Nair de Teffé (under the pseudonym Rian) in the 1910s, the illustrations the Federação Brasileira pelo Progresso Feminino (Brazilian Federation for Women's Progress) used in the publications of the “Feminismo” (Feminism) section of the newspaper O Paiz in the late 1920s and, finally, the comic strips “Malakabeça, Fanika e Kabelluda” (Malakabeça, Fanika and Kabelluda) by Patrícia Galvão (popularly known as Pagu), published in the periodical O Homem do Povo in 1931. In addition to analyzing the works of these women, the article proposes a comparison with the comics published in the magazine O Malho, a mass humor periodical from the early 20th century. The highlighted illustrations, authored by the caricaturists J. Carlos and Leônidas, are representative of the dominant production of the time, which evoked sexist conceptions of gender relations. Our goal is to discuss the particularities and similarities of the works envisioned by women, in which the critical and subversive gaze of these figures predominated in the face of the society of their time. The historical and comparative approach makes it possible to recover these little-known graphic narratives, and shed light on the gender and power relations that constitute the universe of the press and humorous publications then.