The Women

The scent of the devil is in the air, said the vicar of Miguel Pereira, as more than 100 women from all over Brazil gathered last week in this scenic, peaceful mountain town northwest of Rio de Janeiro. A smirking TV crew crowded into the local beauty shop, where business was booming. "No reason to get concerned over this conference," jeered a Miguel Pereira attorney. "It's mostly for women to give vent to their vanity." Sniffed a local garbage man: "If they want equality, let them collect garbage."

The big event in Miguel Pereira was the first national women's congress held in Brazil, heartland of Latin American machismo, in 26 years. For all the fretting of the onlooking males, however, the meeting hardly foreshadowed a feminist revolution. For three days the women--white, mostly middleaged, middle class--hammered out resolutions on such matters as day-care centers and drugs, but that was about as far as they cared to go. Delegate Cilesia Furtado, 38, sighed that she was "turned off by most Women's Libbers in the U.S." It seems, she complained, "that women there want to stop being women." Conference Organizer Aristolina Queiros de Almeida was scarcely more militant. "Our fight isn't against men," she said at one point. "On the contrary, what we want is to unite more and more with them. We think in terms of participation, not emancipation."

Participation is no problem in the small (pop. 13,000) town of Miguel Pereira. Conference Leader de Almeida, a plump, fiftyish woman who radiates a sort of friendly simplicity, is not only the mother of four and wife of the local barber, but also the town's full-time mayor. Since her election in 1970, after four terms as a city councilwoman, Brazilians have been startled to discover that they have not only a woman mayor in their midst but an entire town that is run--and run well--by a female administration. That administration came about largely by chance, as women were appointed to more and more posts by various mayors over the years.

Today, the town's local magistrate is a woman, and so are its health-services chief, its notary public, its postmaster, the heads of its two power and light districts and its two school districts. Police Chief Mauricio de Freitas, who concedes that his job is frankly "tranquil," is the town's only male official of any importance. As for Mrs. de Almeida, her troubles are the same as any mayor's. "We need to build more roads, more public parks and more schools," she says. "My two biggest enemies are time and lack of money."

Miguel Pereira notwithstanding, Brazil has not proved to be promising ground for the women's movement. True, it was one of the first Latin American countries to give women the vote (in 1932), but not until 1962 did the Congress strike down the old civil code provisions that put married women on an equal footing with prodigals, savages, minors and the insane. Antidiscrimination laws are on the books, but they are not enforced; Brazilian women are paid about 70% of what men are given for the same jobs.

Informed by a Latin tradition of female domesticity that has annealed over several generations, the women simply have little inclination to get involved in politics, sexual or otherwise. That even goes for Miguel Pereira. "I'm the mayor of the city," Aristolina de Almeida says, "but at home the head of the family is still my husband."

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