As reported on the Agência Senado news page, 3.7 million Brazilian women suffered some type of domestic or family violence in 2025, according to the National Survey on Violence against Women. In addition, the report Retrato dos Feminicídios no Brasil, published by the Brazilian Forum on Public Security, points out that, in 2025 alone, 1,568 women were victims of femicide in Brazil. The data are alarming and demonstrate the strength of gender violence in the country.
The structure of oppression and violence against women in Brazil was formed from colonization onward, through the influence of the Iberian patriarchal traditions brought by the colonizers. In this social model, gender roles were well defined, with women always submissive to men. The family base was formed by the nucleus of father, mother and legitimate children, but also by dependants such as concubines and illegitimate children, as well as workers and enslaved people, all of whom were under the control of the patriarch. The exercise of this domination and power had several facets, because the role of women and, consequently, the type of oppression to which they were subjected were also crossed by their ethnicity.
White women were seen as fragile and passive; they were destined for marriage and the domestic environment, fulfilling the role of producing heirs for their husbands, caring for the house and the children, and were expected to be modest and obedient to their husbands. Black and Indigenous women, in turn, were seen in a hypersexualized and almost animal-like way, and were subjected not only to arduous labour but also to the obligation to satisfy the carnal desires of white men. Sexual abuse was normalized: on one side, wives who were required to fulfil marital obligations in order to produce offspring, regardless of their will; on the other, enslaved women, whose humanity was denied and who could therefore be taken by force whenever their owner wished.
This hypersexualization, however, was not accompanied by eroticization in the same sense in which we understand it today. As historical studies have analysed, the nudity of Indigenous women was initially read by Portuguese chroniclers as a symbol of innocence and purity, rather than sensuality. Their “shaven private parts” and their nudity devoid of malice brought them, in the European gaze, close to innocent creatures. Only with the advance of colonization and Indigenous resistance did nudity come to be associated with poverty, material backwardness and, later, the devil. Enslaved Black women, in turn, had their bodies systematically objectified.
This model of gender relations was brought by Europeans. María Lugones (2014), a researcher in Modernity/Coloniality, points out that pre-colonial societies had distinct social organizations of gender, integrated into their cosmologies and ways of life, and were sometimes non-binary. Although this did not mean that sexual differentiation did not exist, the point is that such differentiation did not necessarily establish hierarchies or reduce people to specific roles.
Marital relations were violent in several respects. In addition to physical violence, abandonment and contempt were common. There was also systematic property violence. According to historian Mary Del Priore, documents from nineteenth-century divorce proceedings show that husbands appropriated money earned by their wives through their own work (market stalls, sewing, street trading) under the legal justification that “of everything the woman had, half would belong to the husband.” A paradigmatic example is the case of Henriqueta Maria da Conceição, in Rio de Janeiro (1848), who requested separation, alleging that her husband, Rufino Maria Balita, not only took her earnings but also covered her with “beatings” whenever she dared to challenge him, reaffirming the “white man’s law” that gave him rights over his wife’s property. Cases such as this show that gender violence was also economically and legally institutionalized.
The Church exercised a certain disciplining of female sexuality, which was seen as the cause of various evils. They associated female sexual desires with witchcraft and argued that women’s inferiority in relation to men made them more susceptible to spirits. Because they carried the burden of original sin, women needed to have their sexuality very closely watched. In colonial times, the idea was defended that women should not leave the house except to go to church.
This control exercised by the Church went beyond moral surveillance: it directly reached the female body. Nudity was conceived as a focus of lust and sin, and women were threatened with divine punishments if they wore low necklines or any ornament that aroused male desire. The beautiful and vain woman was seen as an instrument of the devil. This symbolic violence produced a constant state of shame and self-control, in which women learned to feel guilty about their own bodies. In the religious representations of the period, the righteous always died clothed; the sinner, naked, directly associating nudity with eternal damnation.
Female education was directed toward religious principles and domestic chores. They learned to read, write, cook, sew, embroider... The main purpose of female education was to train them for marriage and for a chaste and religious life. To guarantee purity, girls married very early, from the age of 12, to much older men. They passed from the control of the father to the control of the husband. The husband would often leave his wife in a “house of seclusion,” in the care of a convent, so that he could travel secure in the knowledge that she would not commit the sin of the flesh; however, there were cases in which women were abandoned and confined in these places by husbands who no longer wanted them. Although it was common and acceptable for men to have other women, if their wives committed adultery they had legal permission to kill them “in defence of honour.”
The nineteenth century was the period of scientism, and gender oppression continued, now justified by scientific laws constructed at the time, which ratified the dichotomy between men and women. Man was brain, intelligence and emotion; woman was heart and sensitivity, and women were more susceptible to diseases of the mind.
There were many women who ended up being institutionalized for madness or hysteria. Hysteria was seen as a female disease, which manifested itself through changes of mood, refusal of motherhood, sexuality, and so on. Motherhood was understood as a cure for hysteria, since medical treatises of the period stated that during pregnancy and motherhood hysterical crises diminished. With this, the idea of compulsory motherhood was strengthened through the medical and scientific treatises of the period. The “treatments” for hysteria included invasive and violent procedures, such as bloodletting from the veins of the arms and legs, cold diets based on lettuce broths and camphor, and massages of the kidneys and perineum with “cooling” ointments made from herbs. The medicine of the period treated female sexual desire as an illness to be cured through physical suffering and deprivation. It was also recommended that women sleep only on their sides, never on their backs, in order to avoid the “concentration of heat in the lumbar region,” supposedly responsible for impure desires.
At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, with the end of slavery and the modernization and hygienization of the country, popular habits come to be closely observed. It was expected that the popular classes would provide an adequate but also disciplined labour force, with women being the most closely charged regarding personal behaviour. Bourgeois behavioural logic was also being introduced among workers.
Social medicine determined that fragility, modesty, the predominance of emotion over intellect, the subordination of sexuality and modesty were biologically female characteristics. In contrast, physical strength, authoritarianism, rationality and unrestrained sexuality were biologically male characteristics. Thus, these characteristics ended up justifying the demand for women’s submission and modesty.
Despite this framework of structural violence, women were not merely passive victims and always showed resistance. Many women, especially freedwomen, managed to accumulate wealth through small-scale street trading (the so-called “negras de tabuleiro” and “quitandeiras”), buy their own freedom and that of their family members. Some women resorted to ecclesiastical justice to obtain separation of bodies, alleging mistreatment and adultery, demonstrating an ability to use gaps in the legal system to their advantage. Others used love magic, such as washing their private parts and mixing the water into water given to men, or images of saints manipulated in rituals, as a means of negotiating power in affective relationships, blending African, Indigenous and European traditions. Therefore, the history of violence against women in Brazil is also the history of their everyday resistance.
References:
FÓRUM BRASILEIRO DE SEGURANÇA PÚBLICA. Retrato dos feminicídios no Brasil. Brasília: FBSP, 2026. Available at: https://publicacoes.forumseguranca.org.br/handle/fbsp/291. Accessed on: 06 May 2026
PRIORE, Mary Del (org.). História das mulheres no Brasil. 10th Edition, São Paulo: Contexto, 2017.
LUGONES, María. Colonialidad y género. In: MIÑOSO, Yuderkys Espinosa; CORREAL, Diana Gómez; MUÑOZ, Karina Ochoa (Editors). Tejiendo de otro modo: Feminismo, epistemología y apuestas descoloniales en Abya Yala. Popayán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2014
SENADO, Agência. DataSenado: violência de gênero atinge 3,7 milhões de brasileiras. Brasília: Senado Federal, 2025. Available at: https://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/materias/2025/11/24/datasenado-violencia-de-genero-atinge-3-7-milhoes-de-brasileiras. Accessed on: 06 May 2026