ABSTRACT
In 1984, local activists from the Rural Women Workers’ Movement (MMTR), backed by the agricultural unions around the town of Serra Talhada, organized the fi rst gathering of women from across the Pernambucan sertão. Th e movement itself had been founded two years earlier in a small local community, called Caiçarina da Penha, one of the fi rst such eff orts in Brazil. At the 1984 Encontro, thirty-three small farmers, sharecroppers, and landless workers from nineteen communities participated in discussions aimed, in part, at refl ecting on the role of women in the rural union movement. Th ough all worked in agriculture, and many were heads of households, less than a third had had any prior relation to the union, refl ecting the historic marginalization of women from the workers’ movement, or, indeed, for some, from even an identity as worker.
