Maria Lacerda de Moura

Maria Lacerda de Moura (16 May 1887 – 20 March 1945) was a Brazilian anarcha-feminist, individualist anarchist, teacher, journalist, and writer.

She was born on the Monte Alverne farm in Manhuaçu, Minas Gerais, Brazil on 16 May 1887. "She was the daughter of Modesto de Araújo Lacerda and Amélia de Araújo Lacerda, freethinkers and educated folk from whom she certainly inherited her strong anticlerical outlook".

"Five years after she was born they moved to Barbacena[, Minas Gerais, Brazil], the town where she started her schooling and by the age of 16 she was training as a primary teacher, the profession to which she was deeply committed." One year later she married Carlos Ferreira de Moura.

As a teacher and a pedagogue in Barbacena she founded the League Against Illiteracy and worked with other women to help provide housing for the homeless. Her ideas regarding education were largely influenced by Francisco Ferrer. Moura used Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi as examples of pacifism in her essay "Serviço militar obrigatório para mulher? Recuso-me! Denuncío!"

She later moved to São Paulo and became involved in journalism for the anarchist and labor press. "Among the labour papers she wrote for were O Culinário Paulista, A Patrulha Operária, A Plebe, A Lanterna and O Trabalhador Gráfico." "At that time of great social upheaval she started to give lectures (some in the city of Santos) to trade unions, cultural centres, anarchist theatre groups and labour associations and the likes of the Printing Workers’ Union, the Anticlerical League and the Union of Footwear Crafts. She also started to write for the anarchist press, among it the newspaper A Plebe where she wrote about ‘the underlying and ancillary sciences of education and educational psychology’ carrying on and adding to the work done in that field by Neno Vasco with the weekly newspaper A Terra Livre in 1906."

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