The dissertation focuses on the novel Úrsula (1859), by the writer Maria Firmina dos Reis, based on some interventions by Lélia Gonzalez and Djamila Ribeiro. The proposal is to examine different intellectual actions that, articulated, proposed to give centrality to the voice of black women. It is a propositional dialogue between intellectuals who have committed themselves to the reflection about their own conditions of insertion in a society strongly marked by the permanence constitutive of traces of the colonial experience in Brazil. Based on ethnic and gender cleavages, the analysis of the nineteenth-century novel articulates with other feminine voices that, in the twentieth century, became remarkable through gestures of resistance and insubordination, simultaneously echoing the project of Maria Firmina dos Reis.