“Olha Brasília está florida, estão chegando as decididas

Abstract

This thesis, based on feminist epistemologies, in its interface with Social Sciences and History, intends to elucidate the feminist resistance of rural, water and forest women in Brazil, organized and self-styled as Margaridas. The Marcha das Margaridas is a broad action by rural women that brings together a diversity of resistance experiences in different territories. Based on the relationship between trade unionism and feminism, it focuses on public policies, putting pressure on governments and demanding effective responses. The Margaridas, heirs of Margarida Maria Alves, a union leader murdered in Paraíba in 1983, build new routes for themselves and for the history of rural women's movements in Brazil and Latin America, whose roots go back to the interiors of Brazil in the last decades of the 20th century and to the fights fought in unions, associations and in the families themselves for space, participation and autonomy over their bodies, their lives and their surroundings. Based on the historical method, oral history and a feminist ethnography carried out in the sixth edition of the March, which took place in August 2019, and in its preparatory and evaluation process, I aim to weave contemporary histories starring rural women – in its many features, accents and origins – whose effects are felt at the individual and collective level in search of social justice and good living and which are reflected in the construction of a political platform for Margaridas and rural feminism in Brazil.