Alonso, Cláudia Pazos. 2020. Francisca Wood and Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture: Pressing for Change. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 35. Cambridge: Legenda.

Cláudia Pazos Alonso’s Francisca Wood and Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture: Pressing for Change is the first book-length study dedicated to an exceptionally important early first-wave European feminist. Francisca Wood was a writer, journalist, and activist whose progressive writings and literary activities made noteworthy contributions to the literary, cultural, and political milieus of nineteenth-century Portugal. The significance of recuperating and bringing to light the meaningful interventions and cultural agency of this visionary figure cannot be overstated. But the book has broader implications as well. By showing Wood’s value and the fact that her contributions were erased from the collective consciousness and history of ideas, Pazos Alonso reminds us of the urgency to rethink Portugal’s nineteenth-century cultural landscape. Our understanding of the Portuguese nineteenth century is missing rich and multifaceted—but also purposely silenced—thinking and writing by women and other marginalized figures and thus more scholarship is needed. Women intellectuals and writers before 1900 have been overlooked, and even those that were prolific and popular during their lifetime have been discredited. Often the more radical, subversive figures were especially suppressed, as Pazos Alonso writes, “Wood’s ‘female otherness’—her unorthodox intellectual dissidence which laid bare structural male privilege—was vilified and de-authorized” (155). Women’s literary and journalistic contributions remain poorly understood in the Portuguese context and Pazos Alonso’s timely study broadens our concepts and knowledge of the long-neglected field. It also counters erroneous notions that Portuguese women writers were few or insignificant. Methodologically it serves as a model example of how scholars could approach nineteenth-century women writers and intellectuals going forward by reading specific and individual examples that are telling of a wider configuration. We need a broader concept of the Portuguese nineteenth-century woman writer, one that includes public intellectuals and pays special attention to periodicals. It is also striking how effectively Pazos Alonso’s book intersects different academic and intellectual fields, including gender theory, periodical culture, transnational studies, and intellectual history.

As each chapter makes a unique contribution to the overall picture painted by Pazos Alonso, I would like to comment on them individually. The first chapter attests to the author’s sophisticated investigative reporting. She pieces together a subtle and discerning narrative of the dynamic lives of the couple Francisca and her English husband, William Wood. She describes how they inherited progressive ideas from their own liberal families and were brought together by mutual loves and interests, such as music. Francisca was devoted early on to specific humanitarian causes, such as mistreatment of prisoners and animal rights. Independently wealthy and able to finance their individual championing of political causes the couple moved to the well-to-do Lapa neighborhood in Lisbon, opened a school of music and humanities, and set up a publishing company. Pazos Alonso’s book includes several useful appendices, including a list of at least ninety titles published by their press. Chapter two fleshes out the cultural landscape between 1848–1867, highlighting significant activity of other Portuguese women writers on the scene: Antónia Gertrudes Pusich, Maria Peregrina de Sousa, Ana Augusta Plácido, and Josephina Neuville. Especially ingenious in this chapter is the reading of Eça de Queirós’s masterpiece, Os Maias, and its likely dialogue with the publication of Josephina Neuville’s Memórias da minha vida. Part autobiography or life-writing and part travel narrative, the text exposes from a woman’s perspective an alternative version of what it was like to experience sexual scandal and economic hardship, exposing society’s double standards.

The subsequent four chapters dive into a detailed analysis of the enlightened periodical founded by the Wood couple after their move to Portugal in 1858, A voz feminina, a weekly with 102 uninterrupted issues that changed its title to O progresso for the last six months of its publication in 1868–69. Unlike the other mostly conservative women’s periodicals published in the 1860s, A voz feminina had a liberal and feminist agenda. Francisca Wood conceived it as a collaborative project, incentivizing and mentoring women writers and their careers. Under her leadership the pioneering publication served as a public platform to debate women’s issues. Chapter three, “The editor and her team,” profiles the members of the dynamic network of primarily women (some male allies are also discussed) that contributed to the periodical. Pazos Alonso outlines how the activity and involvement of this female cast at the heart of the periodical (their poetry, serialized fiction, editorials, correspondence) confirm the wealth, diversity, and undeniable impact of female nineteenth-century periodical culture in Portugal. While important work such as Ana Maria Costa Lopes’s exhaustive study affirm this, it is still underappreciated. Emília da Maia, Mariana Angélica de Andrade, and Guiomar Torresão were three especially important contributors.

Chapter four turns to discussing the strength and radicalism of Wood’s editorials. The topics she covered reveal that Wood’s critical thinking was modern, revolutionary, and ahead of her time and that her writing foreshadowed another radical text, Ana de Castro Osório’s important Às mulheres portuguesas (1905). In what for all intents and purposes is a feminist manifesto, Osório attacks the double standards and legal protections afforded to men, just as Wood took pains in her editorials to call out the systemic pervasiveness of male privilege and so-called male superiority. We see Wood championing intellectual equality between men and women, the importance of female commitment to study and critical inquiry, a concept of gender that separates the biological function of women from intellectual aspirations, equal opportunities in education and access to culture, political, and economic emancipation for all, and an overhaul of women’s roles enabling them to occupy positions of authority and political posts. Pazos Alonso considers Wood one of the first openly anticlerical women in Portugal and, due to her strong stances against the Catholic Church and its assumption of female inferiority, A voz feminina suffered a relentless offensive campaign mounted by Bem público, a conservative Catholic periodical. Criticism of the Church by a woman was extremely divisive, but Wood was willing “to stick her neck out for her beliefs” and take risks. Pazos Alonso writes “her anticlerical analysis underpins the originality of her avant-garde feminist thought” (135).

In chapter five Pazos Alonso analyses the use of open letters, an impressive strategy of political activism Wood employed. For the time, the topics she addressed were advanced and the tone she adopted, courageous—not shying away from divisive issues. These included an animal-rights petition to the City Council of Lisbon, a direct challenge to Pope Pius IX critiquing the Church’s violence and championing women’s education and right to vote, and a letter to revolutionary Spanish leader Emilio Castelar. The open letter was a medium or tool that allowed Wood to put her theories into action dialoguing with individuals who had transnational authority. The letters also reinforce Wood’s anticlericalism and her allegiances to freemasonry and republicanism. Her role as female editor made her a de facto public intellectual. As she did earlier very effectively, Pazos Alonso again juxtaposes the developments in Wood’s writing (journalistic and otherwise) with specific features in Eça’s novels, citing Eça’s inclusion of Guiomar Torresão Almanach das senhoras or Os Maias’ Maria Eduarda’s outraged reaction at seeing animal cruelty in Lisbon. Pazos Alonso shows how Eça’s later representations and inclusions of these topics and issues attest to the significance and dissemination Wood’s pioneering thinking and periodical had decades earlier on the Portuguese cultural milieu, even if these comparisons also reveal the backlash many of her forward-thinking ideas suffered.

A transnational scholar herself, Pazos Alonso states in her last chapter, “Spreading the Word,” that A voz feminina should be regarded as one of the first overtly feminist periodicals in Europe. Capitalizing on her periodical as a forum for public debate and dissemination of ideas, Wood acted as a cultural mediator reporting to her readers on the momentum of European movements for women’s rights. She communicated about the progress of the “Woman Question” and suffragist movement in Britain and provided detailed information about important events, such as women coming together and launching associations in France and the United States, clearly with the intention of motivating Portuguese women to do the same. She published correspondence from abroad. She took news from other journals and recycled their content into her editorials and open letters. It is remarkable to see that the last issues of the periodical juxtaposed on the one hand the imminent end of the periodical now called O progresso, while on the other referencing the increasing momentum of women’s rights movements abroad. Wood used the design of the paper to emphasize the contrast between Portugal’s narrow-mindedness and backwardness and international emancipatory victories for women.

After the closure of the paper, Wood was increasingly marginalized, although she continued with subtle forms of activism, like the innovative translation of Brontë’s Jane Eyre into Portuguese. Ultimately, however, Pazos Alonso argues that Wood’s ideas and political stances were too much, too early for Portuguese conservative society to handle. While her editorial vision in the periodical stands “as a vocal embodiment of a radical feminist counterculture” (181), Francisca Wood would eventually be overlooked even by the later first-wave feminists. This is a thorough and inspiring book that proves that while it might have been too early for Wood’s radical thinking it is never too late to bring it to light.