Maria Lacerda de Moura

Maria Lacerda de Moura
Portrait by Gioconda Rizzo, 1926
President of the International Women's Federation
In office 1921–1922
Personal details
Born	(1887-05-16)16 May 1887 Manhuaçu, Brazil
Died	20 March 1945(1945-03-20) (aged 57) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Resting place	Cemitério de São João Batista
Spouse	Carlos Ferreira de Moura (1905-1925)
Domestic partner	André Néblind (1926-1937)
Education	Escola Normal Municipal de Barbacena
Occupation	Teacher, writer
Known for	Individualist anarchism, feminism, anti-fascism

Maria Lacerda de Moura (Manhuaçu, 16 May 1887 – Rio de Janeiro, 20 March 1945) was a Brazilian teacher, writer and anarcha-feminist. The daughter of spiritist and anti-clerical parents, she grew up in the city of Barbacena, in the interior of Minas Gerais, where she graduated as a teacher at the Escola Normal Municipal de Barbacena and participated in official efforts to tackle social inequality through national literacy campaigns and educational reforms.

She began to publish crônicas in a local newspaper in 1912 and in 1918 she published her first book, Em torno da educação, made up of crônicas and conferences she gave in Barbacena on the subject of education. From then on, she established contacts with journalists and writers from Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. During this period, she met José Oiticica and adopted the progressive education methods of Maria Montessori and Francesc Ferrer. She moved to São Paulo in 1921, at the age of 34, and there she had contacts with the feminist movement and the labor movement of the time. She even collaborated with the feminist Bertha Lutz and presided over the International Women's Federation. In 1922, she broke with the women's associations, which were fundamentally concerned with women's suffrage, because she considered that the fight for the right to vote answered a very limited part of women's needs. She collaborated assiduously with the labor and progressive press in São Paulo and in 1923 launched the magazine Renascença.

Between 1928 and 1937, she lived in a farming community in Guararema, in the interior of São Paulo, formed by individualist anarchists and Spanish, French, and Italian deserters from World War I. It was the period of her life in which she produced and acted the most, collaborating weekly in the newspaper O Combate [pt], where she established the polemic of greatest impact with the local fascist press; she gave conferences in Uruguay and Argentina, invited by anti-fascist educational institutions; she met Luís Carlos Prestes, in exile in Buenos Aires; she gave pacifist conferences and triggered the anti-fascist campaign in São Paulo. The Guararema community was disbanded with political repression during the Estado Novo. In 1938, Maria Lacerda moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she worked at Rádio Mayrink Veiga reading horoscopes. She died on 20 March 1945.

Considered one of the pioneers of feminism in Brazil, her work dealt with subjects such as the condition of women, free love, the right to sexual pleasure, divorce, conscientious motherhood, prostitution, the fight against clericalism, fascism, and militarism, and established a link between the problem of women's emancipation and the struggle for the emancipation of the individual from capitalism. Her positions share many similar aspects with those of later second-wave feminists.