“Tell Me the Mother You Had...”

This chapter aims to describe peruse a cross-section of the source bibliography making up the corpus of the anti-feminist, and often misogynist materials that evince the ingredients making up the prescription for “the Portuguese home.” It highlights bespeaks an agonistic loss of points of reference in a national human cartography grafted onto the female body. The acclaim, nevertheless, is qualified by the paternalistic proviso that Portuguese housewives’ “native qualities” must be “directed”. There is, however, literally a world of difference separating both textual incursions and pseudo-foreign gazes onto the gendered native land. It is precisely as a laughable, despiteful, anti-exemplary model of a foreign-made, individualistic feminism appropriating and exploding the un-reason of a culturally constructed “feminine” difference that Luis D’Oliveira Guimaraes presents the metonymy of women’s bare legs in the humorous skits and chronicles included in Saias Curtas.