This article analyzes the feminist legal scholar production in Law, especially the studies on violence against women, starting from the 1970s. It explores both the emergence of feminism and the studies on violence and gender in Brazil and also examines the growth of this field and the potentialities for new feminist approaches in Law.Keywords: Feminist critique of Law; Violence against women; Rights of women.
ResumoO presente artigo analisa a produção acadêmica feminista no campo do Direito, em especial, os estudos sobre violência contra mulheres, a partir da década de setenta, buscando explorar a emergência do feminismo e dos estudos sobre violência e gênero no direito brasileiro. Examina também o crescimento desse campo e as potencialidades para novas abordagens feministas no Direito.Palavras-chave: Crítica feminista ao direito; Violência contra as mulheres; Direitos humanos das mulheres. 967 relationships, and family ties. They also dealt with changes in everyday life and issues of the domestic sphere and with themes such as love, sex, pain, frustration. This way, they sought to give attention to personal experiences.Dialoguing with Marxism, these journals addressed the theme of the female labor force or female wage labor, but also incorporated other subjects such as maternity, reproduction, sexuality, daycare, schools and health, as we can read in the passage below from the newspaper Nós mulheres:We demand good daycare centers and schools for our children, collective laundries and restaurants at popular prices, so that, together with men, we can take on the responsibilities to society. (Nós mulheres, 1976, page 2). This is also the arrangement of works produced by the pioneering Brazilian scholars with a feminist approach. For example, Heleieth Saffioti, a sociologist, published the book A mulher na sociedade de classes: mito e realidade in 1969, which soon became one of the main references in discussions on the status of women in the realm of work. She analyzes how the "sex factor" works in class societies to get rid of the female labor force in the market. For her, the capitalist organization produces a hierarchy between sexes as a kind of expropriation and determines the roles that a woman plays in the family (sexuality, reproduction and child socialization). Thus, the condition of the woman, both as the "worker" figure and the "inactive" figure, are built from a hierarchy of sex differences (SAFFIOTI, 1969). This book became a reference for the Brazilian academic reflection on the feminine condition in class societies and for feminist groups that emerged in that period throughout the country and influenced a number of scholarly feminist approaches.
The support given by United Nation for holding the Conference on BrazilianWomen in The International World Women Year (1975) led Brazilian feminists to approach the discourse on women's right and to include it in feminist political strategies.The close involvement of the feminist movement, which was becoming bigger and more transnational, in national and inter...