A trajetória de uma mulher de elite: redes e a herança de Eufrásia Teixeira Leite - 1850-1937

Abstract

This paper investigates the trajectory of Eufrásia Teixeira Leite, a woman belonging to the 19th-century agrarian elite. The analysis focuses on her migration to Paris and subsequent return to Brazil in the late 1920s, exploring how, after inheriting a significant estate, she established transnational networks of sociability. Anchored in social history and inspired by the methodological procedures of microhistory, this research uses the life narrative of this individual as a guiding thread for a comprehensive understanding of broader historical phenomena. Therefore, the aim is to analyze the foundations, purposes, and impacts of her will, elucidating her role and contributions in the social, cultural, political, and philanthropic spheres. Furthermore, it seeks to identify what capital—economic, political, social, and symbolic—she mobilized and accumulated to ensure the execution of her will. Finally, by consulting sources such as periodicals, correspondence, cards, the last will itself, the inventory, and the legal appeals filed against it, we examine the political use of this legal instrument as a strategy to revive a project of progress for the municipality of Vassouras. Our main working hypothesis was that Eufrásia Teixeira Leite's trajectory exemplifies a singular, yet structurally anchored, form of female agency within the Brazilian elite of the 19th and early 20th centuries. By means of a combination of family strategies, financial capital, and insertion into transnational social networks, she not only preserved but significantly multiplied her inherited wealth, subverting gender expectations and using her will as a final instrument of power to shape a project of modernity and welfare for her hometown. The contested execution of this will and the subsequent political uses of its legacy reveal the conflicts, negotiations, and limitations of an elite woman's agency even after death, making it a privileged case for studying the intersections between gender, wealth, power, and memory at the turn of the century.