Histórias de vida: mulheres professoras e a escolha do magistério

Abstract

The present study concerns a qualitative research project, carried out through a privileged instrument of this methodology for analysis and the interpretation of facts, life history, while allowing for the unveiling of subjective aspects, bringing them nearer to live contexts. Thus, the principal object reverts to the moment when women from different generations opt for the choice of teaching as a profession, intending to present some discussion as to how these choices were made, which factors interfered in this decision and how the conceptions concerning the teaching profession have become altered over the past four decades. On a more specific level, the research attempted to reflect upon the teaching profession, principally, in the first stages of basic education, as a purely feminine task. In this sense, there was an attempt to observe if there was a relation of subservience or simply of feminine submission in the choice of the career, based on the stereotype that the woman was born for caring and educating. The relevance of the research is, especially, to demonstrate, through depositions and based on a context in which the great majority of Brazilian teachers consist of women, how the concepts concerning women, the woman in the teaching profession and teaching as a profession for women have been altered. In addition, among other aspects, in the speeches of those interviewed there are frequent allusions as to the very low professional remuneration, the loss of the “sparkle of the profession” and the professional devaluation to which they were submitted. In this perspective, based on a revision of the literature on this theme and from interviews carried out on the subject, inserting themselves in questions of this type, the study has intended to help reveal the differences, causes and existing intentions in the option for feminine teaching, throughout four decades, and what made women choose this profession, throughout these years.