Nísia Floresta is often called "the Brazilian Mary Wollstonecraft" because people thought her first book was a translation of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women. We now know that she was really translating a political pamphlet by someone who wrote under the name Sophia. But Floresta does have some things in common with Wollstonecraft, especially with regard to women’s rights.

Like Wollstonecraft, Floresta called for women to have the same rights as men. This was part of her commitment to Cartesian dualism: if the soul is totally separate from the body, it has exactly the same capacities whether it's in a man’s or a woman’s body. Since women are just as smart and competent as men, they should have the right to vote, to run for office, to contribute to public debates—and to do that, they need to be educated.

One of Floresta's most interesting thoughts is that education isn’t just a matter of teachers and schools; it also includes the wider culture, and how children are raised at home. When Floresta was writing, Brazil still had slavery, and slave-owning families often had slaves raise their kids. Floresta objected to this: she strongly opposed slavery, and said mothers should raise their own children.

So what about fathers? Given her call for equality among men and women, you might think she would have wanted men to be equal partners in the raising of children. But she didn't call for this. In fact, she believed women should have different roles from men. And she also said women should cultivate "feminine" virtues—a fact that's particularly surprising given her vigorous critique of enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. How did Floresta end up agreeing with Rousseau that there are distinctively "feminine" virtues?

Well, Floresta’s position isn’t exactly the same as Rousseau's. Rousseau had argued that women must be educated to please men: “To be pleasing in his sight, to win his respect and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him in manhood, to counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy—these are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught while she is young.” Floresta rejected this. Her picture of women's duties focuses not on pleasing men but on the cultivation of virtues like self-sacrifice. According to Floresta, having these special duties is good for women, and makes them morally superior to men.

Maybe that's not as troubling as Rousseau's views, but self-abnegation does seems like a high price to pay for moral superiority. After all, on that logic, the most virtuous people around would be people with no freedom at all. In one of her essays, Floresta speaks movingly about an African man forced into slavery and said he was spiritually superior to his captors. (Floresta was not just an abolitionist but also a big proponent of indigenous rights.) In some ways this is inspiring, but it still leaves us wondering why we can’t have virtue and freedom, both at once. How can we implement all aspects of Floresta's vision, allowing self-abnegation to survive in a world of universal freedom? Our guest, Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, will surely help us find out.