Women’s Right to Vote in Brazil, Women's Suffrage, woman

Women, Culture and Peace › Women’s Days for Culture of Peace › Calendar › Culture Women’s Day Brazil › Brazil

Culture Women's Day Brazil

Women's Right to Vote / February 24, (1932)

One of 193 national Women’s Days for Culture of Peace — a day for every UN member state. See the full calendar.

BR

When did women get the right to vote in Brazil?

February 24, 1932 is the date Brazil celebrates women’s suffrage. On this day, President Getúlio Vargas signed Decree 21,076, the country’s first Electoral Code. For the first time, women gained the legal right to vote and to stand for election. Culture Women’s Day Brazil follows this national tradition, marking February 24 as its annual date.

Brazil was the first country in Latin America to take this step.

The 1932 decree came with restrictions. Married women needed their husband’s approval. Only financially independent women or widows could vote freely. Yet the door had opened, and the movement did not stop there.

July 16, 1934. The new Brazilian Constitution enshrined women’s suffrage as a full constitutional right. It removed the earlier restrictions and made women’s political participation a permanent constitutional guarantee.

1965. Electoral registration became mandatory for women on equal terms with men, closing the final formal gap in equal voting rights.

Each step matters. February 24, 1932 marks the breakthrough moment Brazil chose to remember and celebrate. The path from that first decree to full equality took another three decades.

How did Brazilian women win the vote?

The movement grew steadily over decades, shaped by science, law, and cross-border solidarity.

  • 1879. Brazilian women gained the right to attend university for the first time. Education became a foundation for political organizing.
  • 1910. Leolinda de Figueiredo Daltro founded the Republican Feminist Party in Rio de Janeiro, one of the earliest formal suffrage organizations in Latin America.
  • 1919. Bertha Lutz returned from studying in Paris and London, bringing international feminist ideas back to Brazil. She founded the Brazilian Federation for Feminine Progress in 1922.
  • 1928. Celina Guimarães Viana became the first woman to vote in Brazil, in the town of Mossoró, Rio Grande do Norte, after a local law permitted it.
  • 1932. Vargas signed the Electoral Code. Lutz had lobbied the government directly. Brazil’s suffrage movement succeeded partly through legal argument and partly through international feminist networks.
  • 1933. Carlota Pereira de Queirós became the first woman elected to Brazil’s national parliament.
  • 1934. The new Constitution removed all remaining restrictions on women’s voting rights.

Key Women in the Brazilian Women’s Movement

Bertha Lutz (1894–1976)
A zoologist, diplomat, and Brazil’s most prominent suffrage leader, Lutz studied in Europe and brought the international feminist movement back to Brazil. She founded the Brazilian Federation for Feminine Progress and lobbied directly for the 1932 Electoral Code. She later helped draft the UN Charter’s gender equality provisions.

Berta Lutz in 1925, leading figure of the feminist movement in Brazil
Bertha Lutz

Leolinda de Figueiredo Daltro (1859–1935)
A teacher and indigenous rights activist, Daltro founded the Republican Feminist Party in 1910, one of Latin America’s first formal feminist organizations. She marched through Rio de Janeiro’s streets demanding the vote at a time when public protest by women was deeply uncommon.

Carlota Pereira de Queirós (1892–1982)
A physician and public health advocate, Queirós became the first woman elected to Brazil’s national parliament in 1933. She used her seat to advance public health legislation and women’s rights. Her election came a year before women’s suffrage became a constitutional guarantee.

Celina Guimarães Viana (1890–1972)
A schoolteacher from Mossoró, Viana became the first woman to vote in Brazil in 1927, under a local law that predated the national Electoral Code. Her act of registering to vote was a deliberate, public challenge to the political exclusion of women.

Dilma Rousseff (1947– )
Brazil’s first female president, Rousseff served two terms from 2011 to 2016. Her path to office included imprisonment as a political activist under the military dictatorship in the early 1970s. Her presidency demonstrated the full distance Brazilian women had traveled since 1932.

Lucía Xavier (active today)
Founder of Criola, a Rio de Janeiro NGO dedicated to Black women’s rights, Xavier has spent decades documenting and combating violence against Black women and girls. Her work connects the historic struggle for suffrage to the urgent contemporary fight against femicide and racial inequality.

Why this day matters today

Brazil’s gender equality record today shows a stark contrast between formal rights and lived reality.

Brazil ranked 134th out of 193 countries in women’s parliamentary representation in 2024, the lowest in Latin America. Women make up barely 18% of elected municipal officials. Yet Brazil hosted COP30 in Belém in November 2025, positioning itself as a global environmental leader. The gap between international leadership and domestic gender equality remains wide.

Violence against women is the most urgent challenge. In 2025, femicide reached a record level: at least 1,470 women killed, an average of four per day. The victims are disproportionately Black women from lower-income communities.

Progress exists alongside this crisis. The Maria da Penha Law, enacted in 2006 and celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2026, created Brazil’s framework for protecting women from domestic violence. An Equal Pay Law passed in 2023 established mandatory pay transparency for employers. Brazil’s Ministry of Women, reestablished in 2023, now coordinates gender policy across all states.

The 1934 Constitution guaranteed Brazilian women’s votes. The work of making those votes count, in safety and equality, continues.

Explore current data at Gender Gap Brazil.

Culture Women’s Day within Women, Culture and Peace

Culture Women’s Day Brazil is part of a larger framework: Women, Culture and Peace (WCP). WCP builds on UNESCO’s Culture of Peace programme and the UN’s Women, Peace and Security agenda.

WCP works through culture, art, and community rather than formal institutions alone. It follows a women-centered organizing model, developed by scholars Stall and Stoecker. This model builds relationships and shared leadership, instead of competing for power.

Women’s Days for Culture of Peace is one expression of WCP. The initiative marks a day for every UN member state — 193 in total. Each day recognizes a nation’s path toward women’s political voice. Each day also opens space to reflect on peacebuilding, gender equality, and sustainable development still ahead, central to SDG 5.

Brazil’s rich tradition of street protest, community organizing, and cultural expression makes it a natural home for this kind of day.

What could Culture Women’s Day Brazil become?

This day is still young within the Women’s Days for Culture of Peace calendar. Its meaning is not fixed. It can grow as more people discover it and decide what it should hold.

A national Women’s Day could become a moment to honor the suffrage pioneers of 1932 and 1934. It could become an occasion to name the gap between constitutional rights and daily reality. It could become a space where art, music, and community — all deeply Brazilian traditions — carry the conversation forward.

None of this is prescribed from above. Like WCP itself, the day grows through shared leadership, not instruction. Brazilian culture already knows how to do this. The day simply offers a recurring date to gather around.

Ideas for celebration and reflection

These are starting points, not a program. Pick what resonates. Leave the rest. Add your own.

  • Online. Share a post or story using #CultureWomensDay or #WCP, and name a woman from Brazil who inspired you.
  • In schools. Start a classroom dialogue about women’s suffrage in Brazil, paired with a question: what does political voice mean today?
  • In culture. Organize a library display, a small exhibition, or a reading group built around women’s history in Brazil.
  • In organizations. Pause during a team meeting to mark Culture Women’s Day Brazil and connect it to ongoing equality work.
  • At home or with friends. Share one story about a woman who shaped your own family or community history.
  • In communities. Host a local PeaceTable-style gathering, open to anyone with a story, a question, or an idea to bring.

Some of these need an afternoon. Others need only a sentence shared with a colleague. Both matter.

A growing network, one country at a time

Brazil is one node in a global pattern of 193 national days. With over 215 million people and the largest population in Latin America, Brazil carries particular weight in this network. What Brazilian women build around this day can inspire neighboring countries and the broader Latin American women’s movement.

RYB does not direct this growth. It offers the framework, the calendar, and the connection back to WCP. What happens next depends on the people who discover it.

Looking Forward

Culture Women’s Day Brazil marks February 24, 1932, when Latin America’s largest country first opened the vote to women. That date is the one Brazil itself remembers. It anchors this day in a moment of real, historic breakthrough.

Its future remains open. Brazil faces a genuine tension between its ambitions as a global leader and the persistent inequalities its women face at home. Culture Women’s Day Brazil can hold both truths: pride in what was won in 1932, and urgency about what remains unfinished in 2026 and beyond.

The invitation stands open. Explore the Women, Culture and Peace framework, browse the calendar of 193 national days, and consider what this day could mean to you on February 24.

Sources and Links

Share this story: