THE GENDER OF SOCIAL WELFARE: MATERNALISM AND PATERNALISM IN BAHIA’S ESTADO NOVO
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Abstract
The decades of the 1930s-1940s saw an unprecedented expansion of social welfare programs dedicated to poor Bahian mothers and their families. These initiatives embodied the state’s most comprehensive attempts to become a type of substitute for those elements of family life that medical reformists defined as essential to healthy child-rearing and by implication to the future health and vigor of the Brazilian populace. Though Bahian maternalism preceded the Vargas era, the Estado Novo provided a new national context for the state’s assistance programs. The presidency of Getúlio Vargas, Brazil’s ultimate patron and Father of the Poor, epitomized the political salience of women’s health and their childrearing activities. By tracing the experiences and ideologies of Bahia’s maternalist movement during the Vargas administration, this paper argues that a tension existed between the national effort to shore up working-class patriarchy and a local emphasis on mothers and women of color as the links between poor families and state resources.
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