Gender and media reception in Estado Novo

Abstract

Based on women’s memories about the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s, this text seeks to understand the ways media reception was forced to find a place of articulation
with everyday life within the constraining context of the period’s patriarchal culture, under its moral hegemony and the rigid boundaries it imposed on the gender roles. Taking biographical interviews with women born in the first decades of the Estado Novo, we approach some modes of reception of radio and television as they configured an adaptation of the then ‘new media’ to deeply internalized censorship regimes in relation to behaviors and gender relations.