Nature, nurture and nation: Nísia Floresta's engagement in the breast-feeding debate in Brazil and France

Abstract

This article looks at the way the Brazilian writer and educator Nísia Floresta addresses issues of race and class within her construction of nationhood. This is achieved through a consideration of the specific subject of maternal breast-feeding as discussed by Floresta in two texts, written in Brazil and France, respectively. A comparison of these works reveals a very different engagement with race and class factors in determining women's claim to citizenship. Floresta, in common with early 19th-century European feminism, believed this claim to lie within the domestic sphere, primarily in the role of mother and educator. The article considers how, as a vital aspect of that role, she portrays maternal breast-feeding as both natural and patriotic. It also highlights the extent to which Floresta was influenced by the prevailing concerns of her contemporaries regarding the risks of wet nursing and the threat posed by household slaves, before going on to consider how this discourse leads Floresta to exclude black slave women from her vision of patriotic motherhood, while acknowledging the maternity of women of all classes in a European context. Patriotic concerns, shaped by racial prejudices, overshadow Floresta's feminism, prohibiting the kind of unifying discourse of motherhood, which she claimed to profess. © 2005 Feminist Review.