Evangelical women in politics: stress between public and private

Abstract

The low representation of women in the Brazilian National Congress has been recurrently criticized by the feminist movements, international agencies and the parliament representatives themselves. From the 513 parliament representatives elected for the 55th legislation, 51 are women representatives, and only 10 of these are evangelical Christians. The acting of evangelical women in politics has not been a subject of interest by the academy in the field of religious and feminist studies. The present article addresses the acting of evangelical women representatives in the current Brazilian politics, taking in consideration the timid participation of women in political parties, the process of evangelical insertion into Brazilian politics and the invisible place of evangelical women on political acting in their parties, including on Legislative drafting related to the right of women. Such an approach has its theoretical basis in discussion of the public/private dichotomy, on the assumption that there is an interdependence between them, and that the social nuisance with the presence of women in the public sphere has to do with the genderization and subsequent hierarchization of such spheres. As a methodological resource, there was made a recollection of the drafts proposals of the 10 evangelical women representatives on their 6 first months of mandate during the current legislation, and also of the draft proposals during the former legislation of the reelected ones.