In this powerful oral history, Daphne Patal evokes the rich and varied lives of Brazilian women. Twenty of them tell their own life stories — women in city and country, in comfort and poverty, and in rebellion and resignation. These stories illuminate ordinary "invisible" women from many different walks of life: domestic servants, secretaries, factory workers, nuns, hairdressers, entrepreneurs, seamstresses, prostitutes, landowners, schoolgirls, homemakers, revolutionaries; single, married, widowed, and divorced; Black and White and in between. Patal conducted these interviews in two contrasting regions—cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro and the more traditional, largely agrarian Northeast: Translated from the Portuguese in vivid, direct, compelling language, the twenty stones convey the feel of contemporary Brazil as experienced by women whose everyday existence and dreams have until now gone almost entirely unrecorded. Through these life stories, we gain a sense of the opportunities and constraints that structure women's lives in Brazil. Patal provides extensive notes to relate the individual lives to the political and economic changes of Brazil, and to corroborate and contrast the women's particular views with information about legal status, health conditions, education, feminist and Black activism, the practice of liberation theology. Afro-Brazilian cults, and the fluctuations of women's economic position. They are not impersonal facts, however, bur rather real women who speak most forcefully in this book. Their self-portraits, brought to life in strong and often eloquent voices, throw a new and even a glaring light on a country, a time, and above all on a profound transformation in women's consciousness. -- back cover.