"Serão perfeitas donas de casa e distintas moças da sociedade": a Escola Doméstica em uma história da educação das sensibilidades femininas em Natal (1914-1945)

Abstract

The main of this dissertation is to understand how Escola Doméstica institution developed discourses about women education producing sensibilities about femininity. Escola Doméstica was a Domestic Education institution, opened in 1914 in the city of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. This school was intended exclusively for women after they completed their full primary education, especially for the elite young women from Rio Grande do Norte. This is a history of women education research, in a Cultural History approach, dialoguing with gender studies, in order to understand how sexual and gender differences are produced historically and discursively, and the process of this practice of distinction in the school genderfication, based on Judith Butler (2003) and Guacira Louro (2003; 2019) theories. Indeed, the school institution is understood as a power dispositive that produces discourses about the body, the sex, the gender and institutes disciplinary practices over that student body, producing regimes of truth for femininity. As a methodology was chosen the Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (1999; 2008), to identify the discursive statements produced by the Domestic School about female sensibilities. Thus, in order to achieve the proposed objective, first, it was necessary to diagnose the women schooling discourses conditions emergence in the Escola Doméstica. Second, to identify the knowledge articulated by Domestic Education as part of an association project between femininity and the home space. And, finally, to identify the modes of subjectivity experienced by the students in light of the institutional project for the formation of the “citizen housewife” figure. Therefore, through this research, a set of discursive regularities were perceived, analyzing how they produced a true effect discourse about the feminine by means of its constant repetition. The discourses produced about femininity by Escola Doméstica acted through the mobilization of domestic knowledge based on a social hygiene logic, defending the place of women in the family, as a protagonist, acting as a mother and a citizen house-wife.