Gioconda Mussolini

Gioconda Mussolini (15 November 1913 – 29 May 1969) was a Brazilian anthropologist. She was a professor at the University of São Paulo, where she taught sociology from 1938 and anthropology from 1944. In the postwar period, she was one of the first women along with Egon Schaden to receive a doctoral degree in anthropology in Brazil.

Biography Born in the Bom Retiro neighborhood, in São Paulo, Brazil, on 15 November 1913, Gioconda Mussolini was the third of seven daughters of Italian immigrant Umberto Mussolini, who arrived in Brazil from Veneto in 1888, and his Brazilian wife Adalgisa Vieiga. She attended primary school at Regente Feijó and São Paulo between 1922 and 1926. In 1944, a year before obtaining her master's degree in anthropology, she was appointed as the Chair of anthropology, created in 1941 and earlier headed by Emilio Willems, a German ethnologist.

She died in São Paulo on May 28, 1969.