Arquivos Femininos de CPDOC

Tabbed

Description & Rationale

Proposal of Partnership between Fundação Getulio Vargas and the Center for Research Libraries to digitize CPDOC’s feminine collection under the Global Collections Initiative.

The debate on women’s role in the public life is becoming ever more relevant. Recent studies have registered the impact of women’s votes in the 2018 election in Brazil, specially showing that, for the first time in Brazilian history, men and women have different voting intentions. The feminist agenda has spread and it has been a crucial part of thinking about the country’s current situation, with the popularization of feminism and the realization that it is impossible to go back on women’s rights that have already been gained.

The increasing political participation of women contrasts with historical data showing a shy feminine participation in Brazil’s public affairs. This shyness, which is closely related to the reduced presence of women in hegemonic historical narratives, leaves distinguishing marks in Brazilian archives. The lack of women-collected documents in archival institutions should be considered under a light in which the presence of women in the public life is silenced.

Women’s archives deposited at CPDOC:

Names	Organized	Size	Date of Donation
Almerinda Farias Gama (AFG)	Yes	0.1 m	1980
Alzira Vargas do Amaral Peixoto (AVAP)	Yes	3 m	1985
Anna Amélia de Queiroz Carneiro de Mendonça (AACM)	Yes	2 m	2010
Celina Vargas do Amaral Peixoto (CAP)	Yes	15 m	1990
Delminda Aranha (DA)	Yes	1.5 m	1973
Hermínia Collor (HC)	Yes	0.1 m	1977
Hilda Machado (HM)	Yes	0.1 m	1977
Luiza Aranha (LA)	Yes	0.5 m	1976
Niomar Moniz Sodré (NMS)	Yes	0.5 m	1977
Rosalina Coelho Lisboa (RCL)	Yes	0.1 m	1976
Yvonne Maggie (YM)	Ongoing	3.5 m	2016

The documents listed under this project have the purpose of increasing the amount of historical sources made available online for free by CPDOC. Of the over 2.7 million pages of archives in the institution, more than 900 thousand have been digitized and made available for free consultation online. These documents can be considered the largest available and accessible primary source of Brazilian history on the internet. Therefore, due to the social relevance of the archives proposed for digitalization, this source will increase the academic relevance of this digital collection, especially considering its specificity.

Reasons for consideration:

In a recent study, it was observed that from the 200 personal archives under CPDOC’s curatorship, just eleven are under women’s names.Because of this gap, and highly driven by the recent debates on the place of women in the Brazilian public stages, CPDOC’s staff published in 2015 an updated Archival Policy of the School of Social Science of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV/CPDOC). For the first time in history, the School has introduced a gender marker when defining its collection parameters. In this document, the Personal Archives Program (PAP) made public its interest in receiving archives about women.

“The Personal Archives Program (PAP) has the goal of receiving, organizing, preserving and disclosing the private archives donated to CPDOC since its creation, in 1973. The collection is constituted, generally speaking, of personal documents from men and women who have had distinguished roles in the Brazilian contemporary public life.”

Although male archives make for the largest part of CPDOC’s collection, it is important to register the presence of women’s archives in the collection since the 1970s, as Delminda Aranha’s archives were donated the same year the institution was founded, in 1973. However, it is important to observe that women’s archives donated in the 1970s were mostly donated attached to men’s. Four out of the eleven collections were deposited at CPDOC as attachments to male’s archives, of whom these women were either wives or mothers. Namely: Delminda Aranha, Luiza Aranha, Hermínia Collor and Hilda Machado.

Author(s):

Multiple

Publisher(s):

Not applicable

Source Format:

Paper

Target Format:

Digital

Program:

GCI Latin America

Resource Types:

Archival materials

Regions:

Latin America and Caribbean

Countries of Origin:

Brazil

Proposal Contributors:

Renan Castro, Coordenador do Programa de Arquivos Pessoais, FGV CPDOC

Posted:

May 31, 2019 11:39am

Updated:

Sep 17, 2019 1:59pm

Activity

Status	Current	Description
Flagged	no	The proposal is flagged for further research.
Vetted	no	The proposal has been examined and vetted.
Ballotted	no	The proposal is currently on a committee ballot.
Approved	yes	The proposal has been selected for reformatting. Reformatting efforts are pending.
Reformatted	no	The proposal has been reformatted and access information is now posted.
Inactive / Declined	no	No longer under consideration for reformatting.