As mulheres no trabalho e o trabalho das mulheres: um estudo sobre as trabalhadoras fumageiras do recôncavo baiano

Abstract

The present research, Women at work and work of women: a study on tobacco women producers from Recôncavo Baiano, had the proposal to study, in the historical field, the presence of women workers in the industrial context of tobacco in Recôncavo Baiano, in the first half of the 20th Century, period which involves the installation, the economic culmination and the beginning of the crisis aggravation of the tobacco in the region. This is not simply a numeric presence, because it brings lived experiences, as well as others subjects and practices which were developed social and culturally in their proper time. This presence is expressed in the relations framed in the work ambit. It also denounces a nature of this work, which was organized on the basis on the sexual division of the labor, as much in the heavy industry as in the domiciliary work, under the social basis of patriarchal relations, which is comprehended here through a feminist point of view, based on the historical and political approach by Palmero, Dahlerup and Costa. Therefore, it was an exercise that requires the consideration of the subject through the women in their proper perspective, when they revisited their memories. Based on the Le Goff and Halbwachs conception of memory, it is possible to understand that the history lived and remembered by people must be comprehended as something socially alive, which has a meaning. To enter this field, it was necessary to use oral data, as well as printed documents, through a female perspective based on Standpoint epistemology, elaborated by Nancy Harstock and Sandra Harding. Considering the commo n working women experiences, Thompson provid ed the comprehensio n according to which they should be recognized as a phenomenon historically built in the group. However, when the experiences are historically built, it is necessary to seek the notion of gender in Scott as a basis to reject the biological determinism and to reinforce the relational character of the female - masculine definition, beyond to comprehend the meaning and the nature of working women oppression. To read the working women resistance against the oppression and exploitation, this res earch relies on the power conception by Foucault, when he proposes that people do not ever represent an inert and passive target of power, but center of transmission, providing the comprehension of working women actions. From the written data, the following documents highlight: registration card of employees from Suerdieck and C. Pimentel cigar factories and an amount of images and sundry documents available at FAMAM, APEB, São Félix Public Archive and in private and personal inventory, such as Annual Memor ials of the Santa Cruz Sisters and Work Cards and photographs given, most of the time, by their relatives. The most unachievable and subjective paths were taken in this research to restore the historical situation and lives of tobacco women producers from Recôncavo Baiano, identifying their surviving and resistance strategies to overcome material necessities, the exploitation in/of the labor, the sexual discrimination operated by oppression, as well the social invisibilit y and try to be free from the inferiority enclosure which they were submitted because of their female condition in that region. Key words: women; gender relations; labor relations; memory; Bahia.