“Women’s work is cheap due to the great abundance that exists": intellectuals and teachers in the daily toil of their offices (Rio de Janeiro, XIX century)

Abstract

In Brazil, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was a context in which, more and more, possible alternatives to a new social order for subordinated subjects appeared, being women an example. From their experiences related to gender, those instructed sought to claim equal rights in education, insertion and better conditions in the worlds of work and in the professional universe. Therefore, this article will analyze the universe of female intellectual work, mainly of teachers, journalists and writers, aiming at identifying the main difficulties, as well as the strategies and negotiations that were used for their daily transits through the streets of Rio de Janeiro.The temporal cutout is delimited in the second half of the XIX and the sources used were the Tratado sobre a emancipação política da mulher e direito de votar, the periodical press and the manuscripts of the Public Instruction of the Empire. The results prove that the coercive conditions of gender to which they were imposed prevented them the professional transit in the intellectual universe.