Alambert, Zuleika (1924–)

Zuleika Alambert (b. 1924), Brazilian Communist Party leader and feminist activist. Born in the port city of Santos, Alambert joined the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) during the political ferment that accompanied the end of World War II and the Estado Nôvo. She was elected to São Paulo's state legislature for the PCB at the age of twenty-four. When the party was banned in 1947 she went underground until 1954.

Alambert served as a member of the overwhelmingly male-dominated central committee of the Moscow-line PCB. Several years after the establishment of a military dictatorship in Brazil in 1964, she went into exile in Chile. Following Salvador Allende's overthrow in 1973, she left Chile for France, where she participated in the organization of the European Committee of Brazilian Women. Returning to Brazil after almost ten years in political exile abroad, she, like some other female activists, encountered difficulties in channeling gender-specific claims through male-dominated political party organizations. She left the PCB and in 1986 published a theoretical criticism of Communist understandings of the "woman question." She served as president of São Paulo's State Council on the Status of Women, and then as special adviser to subsequent council presidents. In 2004 Alambert published a collection of articles entitled A mulher na história-a história da mulher.

See alsoBrazil, Political Parties: Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Zuleika Alambert, "Zuleika Alambert, Dezembro de 1978," in Memórias das Mulheres do Exílio, edited by Albertina de Oliveira Costa, Maria Teresa Porciuncula Moraes, Norma Marzola, and Valentina da Rocha Lima (1980), pp. 48-68.

Additional Bibliography

Blay, Eva Alternam. "Um caminho ainda em construção: A igualdade de oportunidades para as mulheres." Revista da USP 49 (março/abril/maio 2001): 82-97.

French, John D. with Mary Lynn Pederson. "Women and Working-Class Mobilization in Postwar São Paulo, 1945–1948." Latin American Research Review, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1989): 99-125.

                                      June E. Hahner