Ensino profissional confessional para mulheres: A escola de educação doméstica da Liga das Senhoras Católicas, São Paulo (1923–29)

Abstract

In 1909, Brazilian president, Nilo Peçanha, signed the law n. 1.606, which introduced professional teaching as secondary school and stimulated private projects of creating professional school by conceding public funds. After six years, Bishop Sebastião Leme published his pastoral letter where he advocated the Catholic faith restoration through religious education and benefiting from public funding. These facts encounter in this doctoral thesis. It presents a research on a women’s professional school for the domestic service created by the São Paulo’s Catholic Ladies League, in 1923. This institution (its relationships with the Catholic Church and São Paulo society) is the core part of this thesis subject matter. It’s approached in function of the following hypothesis: the league’s school was aimed at educating women much more to live their live in a Catholic way — to be future Catholic wives and mothers — than as professionals of the domestic service. The research’s starting point was the following questions: how was the women education and its co-relation with orientations and values the Catholic Church defended? Has the creation of the ladies league and its domestic school derived from the Catholic restoration? What the school intended: to train for the domestic labor market or for the domestic life? These questions were developed in function of the following research aims: to make an critical analysis of the domestic school’s process of coming into being, being structured and functioning; to outline the school’s student profile as to socio-economic origins, training, learning and teaching practices etc.; to characterize the domestic school’s subsisting means; to analyze discourses about the domestic school. The research was carried out as documentary one in the field the history of the schooling institutions. Its sources included textual and iconographic material, being official and non official, internal and external. The analysis relied upon the discourse analysis and according to three categories as to the domestic school’s creation and functioning: antecedents; movements and agents; pedagogical aims. It was covered the years 1922–9. The research was carried out in “history and historiography of education” research line. Results achieved include: systematization of knowledge on the experience of offering professional school for women by the State of São Paulo and by the Catholic Church; systematic understanding of how the church turned to the religious education — including the professional teaching — to help fulfilling its restoration plan; clarity of how certain social aid ideas become present in the domestic school through the ladies’ league. It happened when they divided students into two groups: the ones who could pay the school and the ones who couldn’t. To whom could pay: frontal special rooms and halls within the school; to whom that couldn’t pay: back rooms and halls with all the improvisation peculiar to a building newly built. Such duality appeared explicitly in varied discourses about the domestic school, as much as the real pedagogical intention as to training offering: much more Catholic than professional. Women would leave trained to be daughters, wives and mothers; to help spreading the Catholic action. When turned public by the press, school’s results showed only a discreet interest in the training of women to be professionals, as if it was a secondary, perhaps, tertiary intention. Therefore, instead of helping working class girls to become workers with a respectful background in the labor market, the state of Sao Paulo helped the Church to make its presence stronger within the Brazilian families from which the domestic school’s students came in destining public subventions to a Catholic school.