Feminine Facades: Brazil’s Conservative First Ladies and the Forging of the 1964–85 Military Dictatorship’s Legitimacy

Conservative women were an integral part of the 1964 coup that installed Brazil’s twenty-one year long military dictatorship. Through groups like the infamous Women’s Campaign for Democracy, catholic, middle-class women organized to agitate the population, ultimately laying the groundwork and cementing civilian support for the coup. While many of these organizations continued to be active well beyond the initial coup, conservative women also found space in politics through increasingly prominent First Ladies. In this paper, I turn to two significant First Ladies of the dictatorship, Yolanda Costa e Silva and Scylla Médici to understand how they served as a direct connection to the women whose support was integral to the regime, while simultaneously developing the role as indispensable to the regime’s continuous legitimacy. I contend that the modern construction of First Ladyship has engendered it as a premiere position for the diffusion of conservative social and political ideologies. Throughout their tenures and beyond, First Ladyship was inherently attached to a public perception of a given President’s masculinity and consequent power, speaking to the legitimizing narrative of the coup and later regime which relied on the conflation of the ideas of family and the nation in one. Furthermore, I argue that Costa e Silva and Médici established the position as an avenue of civilian integration with the authoritarian regime, essentially creating it as a role that lends itself as an avenue for conservative public engagement. Finally, I consider the long-lasting impact of their tenures, seeking a longer historical comparison to contemporary discussion that provides insight into the social, cultural and political dynamics of Brazil.