Coeducation and the Insertion of Women in the Academic Sphere: An Experience, a Trajectory in Brazil

In this work, we study the coeducation established by Minas Gerais State University (Brazil) from the 1940s to the present date. In that context was created the Domestic Sciences School, whose objective was to instruct women to be home economists with skills to influence and teach other women in the society. We aim to analyze the course of superior education of Domestic Science through a specific question: how have the home economists seen themselves in the context of changes in education and insertion of women at the job market and in the public sphere? We have crossed official sources with magazines, diaries, pictures and interviews with the students and professionals to comprehend how those women – students, then mothers, wives, professionals – spread values that kept them in a submissive social status, but from an academic sphere, a public space, which was before reserved to men exclusively. Our focus is a gathering of three elements: the education and its relationship with the women and the transformations of gender conceptions in Brazil throughout time; American home economics and its coming to Brazil; the human subjectivity and its nuances into the case of women who experimented a new living at the public sphere of science academy and through a specific kind of education.