Meet Eliane, one of our fellow 85 Broaders

Meet Eliane, one of our fellow 85 Broaders, who holds as one of her fondest memories the moment when she taught herself to read.  


Literature was my passion ever since I was a child, she says, I was surrounded by all these books and depended on my parents to read them to me.  All I wanted was to be able to understand what the words said – so one day I stared and stared, trying to identify the few letters I'd learned up to then in school and to match them with my memories of the story I’d been read.  And suddenly it happened - the letters began to form words, the words quickly grew into sentences, and all at once the sleeping world of books surrounding me came alive.  I was flying through the sentences and actually reading!  I ran to tell my mother, who was chatting with our neighbor over the wall that separated our homes, and pulled her skirt – I can read! I can read!  The wonderful world of literature opened for me with Sleeping Beauty that day and took me on my passionate journey through the academic world, pursuing a doctorate degree in Literature at USP.

At some later point her life took a different turn when she was given the opportunity to enter the world of business as Head of the Communications Department for McKinsey.  This side step led to a series of other steps that allowed her to be exposed and learn about the different facets of business, and to travel extensively. Today she sees this career transition as one of the reasons for her ability to transit and work comfortably between the academic and business worlds.  Both set of experiences converged in 2004 when she set out on her own with Dixi Communication to offer consulting and training in oral and written communications for companies such as Abril and Vale do Rio Doce.  If I had pursued my initial dream, a purely academic career, maybe I would never have seen as much as I have seen, or become the eclectic woman that I am today.

Literature continues to be the ‘madeleine’ of her life, and has offered her not only the window for her imagination, but also the shelter from what can sometimes be the arid world of business, and the precious elements to deal with difficult times in her life.  Even when I was in consulting I managed to sneak in my bits of literature, and to this day some of the consultants that worked with me remember fondly the poems I used to pass around in small pieces of paper.  Today Eliane still finds time to share her childhood passion giving workshops to adults on short stories and lectures on novels and literary theory.

And what about the challenges of being a woman today?  Think for a moment, she says, we wouldn’t be able to be sitting here having this chat and coffee if we both did not have an underlying structure to support us – by which I mean the privilege we still have in this country to have people working for us so we can continue with our careers, for example.  But we may be trying to embrace more than we can handle, and in doing so are forgetting ourselves – instead of using our structures to be overachievers we should use them to be more efficient and bring more of our feminine qualities, such as spirituality and nurturing, to the workforce. 

In her view, what role should our group 85 Broads play in our lives?  It should help us expand and strengthen the structure that we all need to perform our multiple roles in our personal lives and in society.  This group gathers us so we can grow strong relationships to help each other in times of need, but also to help us all bring out more of the women in us.   She recalls with special fondness her doctorate thesis – Feminine Characters of Realism – A Rhetoric on Passion.  She dedicated years to study women characters created during this period that questioned the masculine role.  Ironically, she explains, most of these women characters were created by male writers - but they hold a truth so deep that they have been able to influence our  societies.   How?  Because these authors used their own passion as a rhetoric resource (among others, of course) to convince the readers of their truth. 

What in my opinion we women need, Elaine believes, is to develop an intelligence that knows how to question and how to co-operate, and this is something that our 85 Broads reunions can help us with.