Gender in Brazilian Diplomacy: rationalization of the Getúlio Vargas' public administration and the 1938 prohibition of women in Brazilian foreign service

• Grant number: 19/11247-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: September 03, 2019
• End date: January 02, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - International Politics
• Principal Investigator: Felipe Pereira Loureiro
• Grantee: Luah Batina Tomas
• Supervisor: Katherine M Marino
• Host Institution: Instituto de Relações Internacionais (IRI). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 18/05057-4 - Itamaraty and public administration restructuring during the Vargas era: the Osvaldo Aranha reform of 1938 and the obstruction of womens access to the diplomatic career, BP.MS

Abstract

This research will examine the motivating discourse around the process of modernizing the public administration during the Getulio Vargas government (1930-1945), and its role in the decision, within the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations, to prohibit the access of women to the diplomatic career in 1938. As preliminary results show a possibly significant influence of the United States model of public administration in the Brazilian reforms, this internship proposal will aim to investigate key individuals in these processes - how they spoke, promoted and justified their actions -, relying on U.S. primary sources to identify the collective meanings around the perceptions on the presence of women in public service and, more specifically, in diplomacy. Understanding that the 1938 decision was not random or trivial and that its causes shed light on deeply-rooted power dynamics, this research pretends to comprehend, under a feminist perspective of International Relations, how the idea around the necessity of a state bureaucracy supposedly more rational and efficient might have framed characteristics associated with femininity - and the presence of women as embodiment of such - as counterproductive to the state.