Crazy or modern? Women in review (1920-1940)

Abstract

Through the lenses of cultural history, this article analyzes changes in gender relations during the decades of 1920 to 1940, a period of great modernization of Rio de Janeiro. The sources selected for analysis gave voice to scientific journals; open letters of sentimental columns; and readers’ letters of magazines. Of novelty, the article underlines the role of the "modernists", one of the many categories constructed in the context of the redefinition of the feminine social roles that oscillated between vanguards and pathology’s representations.