A “República de Saias”: trabalho feminino em Belém (1890-1920)

Abstract

In this thesis, I analyze women's labor in the city of Belém during the first three decades of the Brazilian Republic. By exploring the representations constructed about women within the context of the feminist movement's development in Europe and the United States, I establish a relationship between these representations and the daily lives of working women in Belém, who, in various ways, participated or sought to participate in the labor market. Considering the periodical press as a significant instrument for reproducing and disseminating these representations, I selected newspapers as my primary sources. These publications provided the most prevalent representations of women, albeit through fragmentary and scattered traces of the lives of women in the capital of Pará during this period. While newspapers were my main source, I also utilized other materials, such as Government Reports, as valuable tools for mapping different areas of the city. This approach allowed me to identify a female population engaged in various sectors of urban labor who, despite being subjected to rigid norms dictating female submission to male authority, devised ways to transcend these constraints. Through protests or gradual, silent actions, these women sought solutions and demanded rights that were socially and politically denied to them.