Subtitle: The Emergence of a Global Feminism
Author:Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira, Translated and with a preface by Peggy Sharpe
Subject: Women's Studies/Latin American Studies
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2557-8
Pages: 160 pp.
Description: A radical proposal that equality between men and women will only be achieved through the acknowledgment of their difference without hierarchy.

"In no other book have I learned so much about women in the public sphere as in this impressive essay. In a continent whose culture has been marked by the work of great women from Sor Juana to Rigoberta Menchú-Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira is one of the most outstanding."-Tomás Eloy Martinez, Rutgers University

Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira is arguably the most influential and visible feminist in Brazil. The emergence of the feminine as a paradigm for social change constitutes the landscape of her essay In Praise of Difference.

Twentieth-century intellectual thought has eroded the foundations of Western culture-education, science, politics, economics, and social relations-and challenged the dialectic of the masculine and feminine, the public and the private, the political and the personal. As the end of the century draws near, Darcy de Oliveira sees women entangled in a search for identity that, paradoxically, takes them back to the very tradition of nurturing that has been used throughout history to demarcate their boundaries and restrict their access to the public sphere. Women are subjected to a dual message-to become a man while remaining a woman-and they are confronted with impossible odds: to be simultaneously themselves and the Other.

Darcy de Oliveira argues that the repression of feminine culture and the rejection of its input to the remaking of civilization will impoverish humankind. She sees the task and responsibility of women to be the full expression of their own history, culture, and life experience, thus enabling humankind to regain its undeniable richness. Only through recognition and acceptance of such difference without hierarchy will gender equality be achieved.

Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira is the president of the Brazilian National Council on Women's Rights and professor of literary studies at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Following her opposition to the military coup in 1964, she lived in exile, studying and teaching at the University of Geneva until her return to Brazil in 1979.

Peggy Sharpe is associate professor of Portuguese and women's studies at the University of Illinois. Her preface puts Darcy de Oliveira's work in context for U. S. readers.