Revista Brasileira de Educação do Campo
The Brazilian Scientific Journal of Rural Education
THEMATIC DOSSIER / ARTIGO/ARTICLE/ARTÍCULO
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.20873/uft.2525-4863.2018v3n4p1344
Tocantinópolis
v. 3
n. 4
p. 1344-1370
sep./dec.
2018
ISSN: 2525-4863
1344
Este conteúdo utiliza a Licença Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Open Access. This content is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-type BY
Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary
teachers in rural Sergipe (1930-1950)
Rony Rei do Nascimento Silva
1
, Ilka Miglio de Mesquita
2
1
Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho - UNESP. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação. Avenida Hygino
Muzzi Filho, 737, Mirante. Marília - SP. Brasil.
2
Universidade Tiradentes - UNIT.
Author for correspondence: ronysocial@hotmail.com
ABSTRACT. The following text seeks to understand the life
stories of retired school teachers, according to their work,
school, and teaching experiences. In order to do so, we analyzed
stories collected from sixteen previously-interviewed teachers,
considering the early-twentieth century policy of feminization in
this profession and, subsequently, the abandonment of the
countryside populace, which in turn left them to their own
devices, keeping them away from educational improvements,
this being the product of heavy investment on the urbanization
model going on in the country at the time. However, schools in
the countryside and their teachers played, in this regard, and in
spite of the precariousness of its facilities and of the overall
training of its teachers, an important role in institutionalizing of
Sergipe’s primary school.
Keywords: Life Stories of Teachers, Feminization of Professor
Ship, Sergipe.
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
Tocantinópolis
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sep./dec.
2018
ISSN: 2525-4863
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Mulheres com enxadas e lápis na mão: histórias de
professoras primárias no meio rural sergipano (1930-1950)
RESUMO. O presente texto tem como objetivo compreender a
história de vida de professoras aposentadas, tendo em vista o
trabalho, a escola e a trajetória no magistério. Analisamos as
narrativas de dezesseis professoras entrevistadas e consideramos
que no início do século XX houve uma política de feminização
do magistério e, consequentemente, o abandono das populações
rurais, que permaneceram desassistidas, afastadas das melhorias
educacionais, uma vez que os investimentos púbicos
concentraram-se no modelo de urbanização que emergia no país,
naquele período. Contudo, as escolas no meio rural e as
professoras desempenharam, neste aspecto, em que pese à
precariedade de suas instalações e da formação de seus
professores, importante papel na institucionalização do ensino
primário em Sergipe.
Palavras-chave: História de Vida de Professoras, Feminização
do Magistério, Sergipe.
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
Tocantinópolis
v. 3
n. 4
p. 1344-1370
sep./dec.
2018
ISSN: 2525-4863
1346
Mujeres con azada y lápiz en la mano: historias de
profesoras primarias en medio rural sergipano (1930-1950)
RESUMEN. El presente texto tiene como objetivo comprender
la historia de vida de profesoras jubiladas, con miras al trabajo,
la escuela y la trayectoria en el magisterio. Así, movilizamos las
narrativas de dieciséis profesoras entrevistadas y, por fin,
consideramos que en el inicio del siglo XX hubo una política de
feminización del magisterio y, consecuentemente, lo abandono
de las poblaciones rurales, que permanecieron sin ayuda, aparte
de las mejorías educacionales, una vez que las inversiones
públicos se concentraron en el modelo de urbanización que
emergía en el país, en aquel periodo. Pero, las escuelas en
medios rurales y las profesoras desempeñaron, en este aspecto,
en que pese a la precariedad de sus instalaciones y de la
formación de sus profesores, importante papel en la
institucionalización de la enseñanza primaria en Sergipe.
Palabras clave: Historia de Vida de Profesoras, Feminización
del Magisterio, Sergipe.
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
Tocantinópolis
v. 3
n. 4
p. 1344-1370
sep./dec.
2018
ISSN: 2525-4863
1347
Introduction
The present text aims to understand
the life history of retired teachers, in view
of work, school and the trajectory in the
teaching profession. This text originates in
the master’s dissertation Kaleidoscopic
Memories: configurations of rural schools
in the state of Sergipe, presented, in 2016,
to the Graduate Program in Education of
the Tiradentes University (PPED-Unit). It
is also part of a national research project
led by Prof. Rosa Fátima de Souza, entitled
Training and Work of Rural Teachers and
Teachers in Brazil: RS, PR, SP, MG, RJ,
MS, MT, MA, PE, PI, SE, PB, RO (decades
from 40 to 70 of the twentieth century).
We took as a source the oral reports
of sixteen retired teachers from eight
Sergipe regions. We come to them through
the research project Oral Memory of
Sergipan Education. To carry out the
interviews, we used Oral History
i
methodology, following the experiences of
Alberti (2012). Also we take as sources the
speech of the sergipano educator Nunes
Mendonça, Messages of Governors, lyrics
of songs, photographs, interviews, among
others. We operate to analyze the
prescriptive-normative elements of
educational regulations that reflect aspects
of the life history of female teachers
retired. To delineate this historic narrative,
we asked: What and how was the work, the
school and the trajectory of primary rural
teachers in the state of Sergipe?
To answer this guiding question, this
article is organized in two sections: the
first one, entitled “... woman only learns to
write for her boyfriend”: work, school and
the feminine in rural Sergipe, in which we
outline the Sergipe social status, from work
and rural primary school marked by the
neglect of the Public Power in relation to
the “poor rural man
ii
”. Instruments
outdated in agricultural work; the improper
conditions of health of the dwellings; the
exodus; the scarcity of medical, sanitary
and hygienic resources; the lack of roads
and highways; the few means of transport
and communication are elements that have
contributed to the low level of productivity
in rural areas of Sergipe, as a consequence
of the technical unpreparedness of the rural
workers and abandonment of the
countryside in the country.
In the second section, entitled “... I
lived with my husband and it was a very
painful life”: the feminization of teaching
in rural Sergipe, we analyzed some
experiences lived by female teachers as
students, experiences marked by
abandonment, machismo, isolation and
forgetfulness of the Public Powers. The
initiatives of the State were translated into
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
Tocantinópolis
v. 3
n. 4
p. 1344-1370
sep./dec.
2018
ISSN: 2525-4863
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actions that, in general, did not
meet the needs of the rural environment,
because, through the narratives, we can
conjecture that at the beginning of the
twentieth century there was abandonment
of these rural populations, who remained
unassisted, away from the educational
improvements, since effectively the public
investments focused on the model of
urbanization that emerged in the country in
that period.
“... woman only learns to write for her
boyfriend”: work, school and the female
in rural Sergipe
In the 1950 census, Sergipe had
644,361 inhabitants, of whom 488,792
lived in rural areas (Mendonça, 1958, 21).
Most of the Sergipe population was
devoted to agropastoral work, including
school-age children, as Raimunda Alves
dos Santos, 83, tells of his experiences in
the village of São Domingos, municipality
of Simão Dias, located in the Center-South
of Sergipe: “In our region, every girl
worked as a hoe. Everyone was sapped by
the sun, the girls were wearing a hat on the
head, that long mango, and they went to
the fields.” (Santos, 2012). The narrative is
complemented with that of another teacher,
Raimunda Maria de Jesus, 83 years old. In
her childhood memories, resurged the
work in the countryside, in the village of
Maria Angola, Tobias Barreto
municipality, around 1940:
... my father was a farmer, so was my
mother. I was born in a place called
Maria Angola, municipality of
Tobias Barreto, but Maria Angola is
a country. After she was seven years
old, she was going to work. ... They
got there, they [parents] made a
container
iii
for us to work with. At
that time it was different. The games
were a digger, a sickle to work in the
field. That was the joke. Seven years
was going to the countryside, but
when I was seven I went to school.
My brothers were not at all. There is
not one that has been saved, there is
not one. (Jesus, 2011).
Diggers, hoes and scythes were the
instruments used by the interviewees to
cultivate the land. The childhood narratives
of both describe a precarious work, with
absence of instruments and agricultural
techniques, considered advanced for the
time. According to Mendonça (1958):
“The hoe is still the instrument of work.
Domina, the so-called system of work.
This system of economic relations of
production enriches the owner of the land,
keeps in misery the seed-planter”
(Mendonça, 1958, p. 47). It is worth noting
that agricultural practices also constituted
the family context, as Maria Odete Vieira
dos Santos, 83 years old, in the settlement
of Sítios Novos, municipality of Canhoba,
located in the Médio Sertão sergipano,
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
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p. 1344-1370
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... I was born in a place called
Salgado. My father worked in the
fields, but sometimes he hunted. It
was for our livelihood. He would kill
the deer who would go into the fields
and eat the cotton, eat the beans. ...
Mother was just taking care of the
house, raising her children and
making a pillow. She made a cushion
for me. There was a salty brook. In
the dry season, my grandmother let
the people give water to the cattle
there. They say that the cows drank
the water and went scowling, so salty
it was. (Meneses, 2013).
The jobs with income, cut and
sewing belonged to women. These
activities inspired the Sergipean Antonio
Alves de Souza
iv
, aka “Volta Seca”, to
compose the well-known song Olê mulher
rendeira, olê mulher renda. Our
interviewees, from an early age, were
familiarized with the work on the farm:
children first knew scythes and hoes and
then presented them with pencil and paper.
However, this link of Sergipe children to
the land constitutes a matrix that generates
knowledge, knowledge and social
practices. Thus, the link with land for rural
people is a constitutive and constituent of a
rural culture, sometimes marked by
material, cultural and social deprivation.
This reality led Mendonça (1958) to
consider that the life of the rural man was
the most primitive, narrow and miserable,
added to physical, mental and social
misery. According to him, the rural
Sergipe: “... are unaware of the advantages
and benefits of civilization, and are subject
to subnutrition, obsolete processes and
rudimentary instruments of labor, primitive
forms of economic relations of production”
(Mendonça, 1958, p. 61). This social
picture presented about Sergipe leads us to
think about the Brazilian countryside.
According to Peixoto and Andrade (2007),
in the 1940s, the countryside was very
distant from city life, since “... cultivation
practices based on rudimentary techniques
were close to the pre-capitalist system.”
(Peixoto & Andrade, 2007, p. 117).
Children and even their parents did not
have a “salutary” reference in school
education, perhaps because they
considered the knowledges at the heart of
their own experiences.
Of course the rural school was
conceived as Souza and Ávila (2014a, p.
24): “Now to instruct, civilize, moralize,
sanitize and nationalize, now as an
instrument of modernization and fixation
of man in the field and, still, as an element
of stability and national security.”
Education should be able to modernize
man, so that he transformed the “Jeca
Tatu
v
” into a working, healthy, disciplined
and productive Brazilian, because it was
necessary to maintain “... man of the field
in the field, but in conditions to turn into
modern man, in order to implement the
economy associated with the rural one”
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
Tocantinópolis
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(Schelbauer, 2014, p. 79-80). In this sense,
the rural school was designed to teach not
only reading, writing and counting, but
also hygiene habits and the valorization of
rural life.
Mendonça (1958) and a whole
generation of educators bet on school as a
transforming of the mental and social
structure of the rural population. In his
view, it was necessary for the rural man to
abandon the obsolete techniques of
cultivating the land and to incorporate his
scientific work into his agricultural work.
In 1955, in the state of Sergipe, the rural
masses reached 69.5% of the state
population. In the words of Mendonça
(1958), agriculture stood out for the
plantation of cotton, rice cultivation
vi
,
sugar cane plantation, cattle raising,
archaic fishing and subsoil riches. It is
worth emphasizing the relative
industrialization, which was at an
embryonic stage. Regarding economic
activities related to the cultivation of land,
Maria Odete Vieira dos Santos said: “We
planted potatoes, manioc. Father was not
rich, had many children. So Father Lima,
who was from here, created a cotton-
ginning factory, which here was cotton
farming” (Santos, 2013).
According to Mendonça (1958), rural
Sergipe needed deep social and mental
reform through education, because one of
the reasons for the state’s economic
backwardness was “... the absence of
schools that would provide, besides
knowledge on the environment, technical
and economic education for the conquest
of new and more advantageous forms of
relations as a geographical environment”
(p. 29). In order to do so, a school was
needed that, “without departing from the
general guidelines of education, without
prejudice to the essential purposes of basic
education, undifferentiated, common to all,
do not lose sight of the necessity of rural
life and contribute effectively to urbanize
the countryside” (p. 21).
The rural school was conceived as a
modernizing agency of man and his work,
and more than that, he proposed to train
pupils and teachers in a new mentality.
However, part of the Sergipe rural
population discredited the school, as
teacher Raimunda Maria de Jesus says:
“My father is one of those ignorant people.
He did not want to go to school, because
he said that in school it only gives you
laziness” (Jesus, 2011). In fact, one of the
problems was that there was a
preconception of the rural population in
relation to the school, since the population
understood that the child should pass
quickly through the school and, later, go to
the countryside. In this sense, the parents
of some teachers claimed that daughters in
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
Tocantinópolis
v. 3
n. 4
p. 1344-1370
sep./dec.
2018
ISSN: 2525-4863
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school would learn to write letters to their
boyfriends:
... my father let the men, because he
says that men were to learn and
women were to work, because
otherwise, he said it was for
boyfriend. These ignorant people, are
not they, my son? From that time.
Then he would not let everyone
study, but even so, we got through
our mother. (Bispo, 2012).
On the same aspect, Maria Lita
Silveira and Maria Dagmar Menezes
narrated:
... when I went to school, Maid
Maurita [the teacher] she was
walking home. Then she came in and
said, ‘Why do not you put Lita down
to study?’ So my father said, ‘No,
because a woman’s daughter only
learns to write for her boyfriend.’ Did
not the old folks of the last century
use to think like this? (Silveira,
2012).
... I was a young girl and to study
was a suffering. My father never
allowed me to study, as he could not
accept myself being a teacher. My
father, with poor ignorance, would
say, ‘A teacher has intimacy with
everyone, she talks to everyone ...
No, a teacher could not be a girl.’
Teacher was the life of the world, but
even so, I disobeyed my father, I
achieved my desire as a child: to be a
teacher. (Menezes, 2012).
At the beginning of the twentieth
century, it was common for girls from the
interior of the state of Sergipe to attend
primary school. However, the idea that a
woman should learn to care for a house,
her husband, and her children was part of
the mentality of the population, especially
the rural population. Changing the
mentality of the rural population was the
main goal of the school. According to
Mendonça (1958), the mental utensils of
the rural man of Sergipe were worth the
clothes he wore. Thus he described the
Sergipean rural man's attire: “... The
garment consists of coarse trousers and
shirt, rustic espadrilles, and a leather hat or
plaited straw.” (Mendonça, 1958, p. 61).
Sergipe's state of poverty and deprivation
was felt in his clothing, according to
Professor Helena Guilherme da Silva
Santos: “I met a ‘muier’, that her clothes
had so much patch, so much patch, so
much patch that you did not know what
was the color of the cloth, and many lived
patched and standing barefoot.” (Santos,
2013). Apart from the clothes, the
Sergipe's misery showed through the hut
that inhabited it. Mendonça (1958) made
use of Monteiro Lobato expression “makes
the animals laugh
vii
” in order to describe
the type of dwelling typical of rural
Sergipe. The typical constructions were
houses of taipa
viii
, maintained more by the
condition of poverty than as an
architectural alternative, expressed an
intense relationship between the rural man
and the environment that surrounded him.
According to Mendonça (1958: 59), in
rural areas,
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
Tocantinópolis
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n. 4
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sep./dec.
2018
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... the ‘brain furniture’, again
resorting to Lobato, 'worth the hut it
inhabits' ... the predominant type of
habitation is the mud-clad house,
covered with coconut straw, with a
window and door in front, dark and
little airy, without sanitary facilities
and abandoned the minimum
conditions of habitability and health.
In the suburbs and in the rural areas
of other zones, the same type of
house predominates, with the
covering of tile.
The construction of a home made
of earth amalgamated by water and
supported by sticks constituted a moment
of solidarity of the rural community.
Professor Maria Luiza Barbosa da Silva
described the community way of building
mud houses in the village of Sebastião
Marques, municipality of Poço Redondo,
Sergipe High Sertão territory:
... it was a house made out of taipa,
there was no masonry house, no
block. It was made of mud. At that
time people were very fond of
battalion. So the people got together
to work together, right? Then the
owner of the work made the food and
invited the people and the people
came to work. Then when it was the
day to cover the house, I started to do
the tapping with everyone. Well,
that's when I built my house. (Silva,
2011).
We can not understand the life
histories of retired teachers divorced from
these social and cultural interactions that
constituted rural primary school. Of
course, school is also the expression of the
material and intellectual conditions of each
time and place. According to Schelbauer
and Gonçalves Neto (2013), work on rural
primary schools is about understanding the
relationship between educational
institutions and the geographic and socio-
cultural contexts that surround them, the
community, and the target audience. Figure
1 depicts the outside of the taipa
ix
house,
and gives us a family of ten members.
Figure 1 - Acrísio Cruz with a family from the rural area of Sergipe (1950).
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
Tocantinópolis
v. 3
n. 4
p. 1344-1370
sep./dec.
2018
ISSN: 2525-4863
1353
Source: Photographic collection of the historian Luiz Antônio Barreto.
Here is the picture of a family in
rural Sergipe! It seems to have been chosen
by Acrísio Cruz
x
to portray the familiar
configuration of the interior of the state,
marked by poverty and deprivation of
sergipano. The members of the family
showed an air of apprehension and
maladjustment generated by the presence
of strangers: the machine and the
photographer; unlike Acrísio Cruz who, in
the right corner, showed an air of
confidence and tranquility. The dejected
countenance of man can reveal to us his
daily life in the work of the field; his
partner surrounded by eight children
indicates the social role of women in the
family and the lack of governmental
initiatives related to birth control, because
the the effect “stair of boys” reveals the
short interval between pregnancies.
According to Rezende (2014), life in
rural Sergipe was not restricted to misery,
because it mixed with joy, since they also
danced and celebrated themselves in
festivities. The favorite feasts, mostly
religious ones, and the forrós that occurred
more intensely in the month of July, in
praise to the harvests. This is how
Professor Eliaalda Sousa Reis narrated: “I
celebrated St. John at home, lit the fire, all
the houses. Then we celebrated the
plantations after the rain.” (Reis, 2011).
During this period, they consumed foods
derived from corn, such as canjica,
pamonha, munguzá and couscous of green
corn, besides cooked and roasted corn. The
fires, retribution to a desire or a grace,
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
Tocantinópolis
v. 3
n. 4
p. 1344-1370
sep./dec.
2018
ISSN: 2525-4863
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scattered in the farmyards, had a religious
character, for they were lit in the days
dedicated to St. Anthony, St. John, and St.
Peter, and so the families gathered to
celebrate the harvest round the campfire as
they roasted corn, telling stories and
releasing rockets (Rezende, 2014). The
teacher Maria José de Carvalho Eleotério
also remembered the parties in the field:
... we lived not only in sadness. The
party I was doing was Baile Pastoril,
Reisado. The Baile Pastoril is the
birth of our Lord. We had to put the
characters, the shepherds, the three
wise men. He had to put one person
with the boy on his arm to stage the
act. On the arm that was to show that
it was Our Lady and make the lapel.
Baile Pastoril I had practice to do.
And so he organized a very beautiful
party all his life. (Eleotério, 2013).
The festivities show the cultural
expressions of a people as well as their
ways of perceiving and dealing with the
transcendent, their past, their identity, their
people. The narratives brought by our
interviewees cross a certain type of society,
social, political, economic and cultural
frameworks. In Bosi (1995) perception, it
is in the study of the memory of the old
that we can verify a social history different
from the current one, because they
organize their narrative following a
ordering from their lived experiences,
which brings up facts, names, dates, which
may not be in the official historical order.
In this way, the teacher Raimunda Alves
dos Santos, in narrating her experiences
lived in the town of São Domingos,
municipality of Simão Dias, located in the
Center-South of Sergipe, traces the social
status of a time and place:
... of school I did not like, but of
singing ... I sang novenas in the
gardens. In the winter I would go, the
mud giving here Bom Jesus da Lapa
in the month of August. Once upon a
time I went by the edge of the night. I
would take the macambira straws,
hold me so I would not step on the
mud. There, I slipped, when I
slipped, I stepped in the mud that the
shoe stayed. When I got to the river I
washed my feet and put on my shoes.
The river had no bridge. She was
kicking a crazy stone like that, when
you stepped, it rolled. Once I came,
they got a loaf of bread and gave it to
me. I with that bread in the greatest
taste of the world. Then, when I
arrived I stepped on the stone that
rolled the stone I fell into the river
like that. The bread the water loaded.
(Santos, 2012).
The narrative of the teacher makes us
think about the conditions of the roads in
rural Sergipe. The mud that formed on the
beaten dirt roads made it difficult for
people to get around. It is worth
mentioning that the main means of
transportation in the countryside were
horses, donkeys and ox carts
xi
. “More than
four thousand of these primitive vehicles
moan on the roadsides of the interior of
Sergipe ...” according to Mendonça (1958,
p. 37). The horse and the donkey were also
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
Tocantinópolis
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2018
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used to transport people. On this point,
teacher Maria Lima Santos Aragão
recalled: “I worked in the fields too. And I
had the children, I would leave here in the
morning, I would put ... I had an animal, I
would put the children, one on the side, the
other on the back, I would take them to my
mother's house”. (Aragão, 2012).
Here these multiplicities of memories
add up to tell the life story of female
teachers and their experiences in rural
primary school in Sergipe. Maria Lurdes
Barreto, 77 years old, recounted her
memories of when she was a student in the
village of Maniçoba, now municipality of
Nossa Senhora de Aparecida, located in
Agreste Central sergipano:
... there was no school nearby. No one
studied, no school. Me and my
younger sister, when we grew up a
little bit, from eight to nine years old,
we went to school in the village of
Tanque Novo.... I would leave home in
the morning, I would return at noon.
Hot sun, raining, just the way it was.
He carried a notebook, a pencil, an
eraser. He would take something to eat
when he came, not to starve, not to fall
on the road. It was not just for me, it
was for everyone. So we learned the
first letters, then the bo-a-ba, then the
primer. ... At that time, schools were
paid, had no schools. (Barreto, 2013).
By “listening to tell” these narratives,
we are faced with a social deprivation, due
to food restriction. “The standard of living
of the Sergipe is precarious. The vast
majority of the population lives in an
infrahuman situation. It dominates, in the
State, the level of poverty. Situation in the
area of endemic hunger ...” according to
Mendonça (1958, p. 58). The presented
situation was of a population that suffered
from inferiorities and physiological
imbalances, due to the chronic hunger.
According to the author, the majority of
Sergipans lived with a half-empty or
falsely full stomach. Undernourishment or
even absolute misery crossed the life
trajectory of many teachers interviewed.
In and out of memory we find
evidence of a society that lived in a context
of deprivation and precariousness, not only
because of the absence of schools, but for
the political domain, social and economic
precarious. Even at a time when Brazil was
considered an eminently agricultural
country and its largest population
contingent resided in rural areas, the
number of schools did not correspond to
the number of the school-age population.
Professor Rosalina Venceslau dos Santos
also spoke about the shortage of schools in
the village Tapera, municipality of
Macambira, located in Agreste Central
sergipano, in the late 1930s: “In Tapera,
there was no school, at that time there was
no school nearby, nor transport to take
people. I would come to Macambira
walking, walking, my son!” (Santos,
2013). These narratives make us reflect
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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and question the educational policies that
were aimed at the rural primary school.
Another aspect brought by the
teachers’ narratives was the students’
double journey - work and study -
according to the parents’ mentality
regarding the permanence of their children
in school. In her memoirs, Maria Lima
Santos Aragão recalled that she alternated
between working on the farm and her daily
school life when she was a student in the
isolated village of Várzea Nova, Gararu
municipality, located in Sergipe High
Sertão: “In the third grade, ‘Look, I do not
have a son to be a teacher or a teacher. So
now already you have reached the stage of
helping us with the work of the country.’”
And he continued: “There, ‘we were’
working, planting, planting. He worked,
picked cotton and everything. So, we left
school to work in the countryside.”
(Aragão, 2012).
Maria Lima's school memories point
to the conditions of the school system in
the most remote areas of the country,
characterized by the high rate of students
being evaded as a result of work in the
field. We know that the diffusion of
primary education in rural areas has faced
several problems of a pedagogical and
administrative nature, among them the low
frequency of students in times of planting.
Thus, a challenge for the Brazilian State,
which should expand rural primary school
in a context marked by “the precariousness
of schools, the low attendance of pupils
and school drop-out, work in the fields.”
(Souza & Ávila, 2014b, p. 11). Another
difficulty pointed out in the narratives was
the lack of provision of teachers for the
created schools. To paraphrase Berger
(2011), until then the rural schools
constituted spaces provided by the great
landowners and they were in complete
condition of abandonment, besides being
subject to the desmandos of the politics of
the colonels. The teacher Raimunda Alves
dos Santos, 83, witnessed these aspects in
the town of São Domingos, municipality of
Simão Dias, located in the Center-South of
Sergipe:
... we would not go to school at the
time of planting, and when
Lampião
xii
was in this world, you
know? And we run a lot and hide in
the woods. ... The school was like
this ... It was a house my grandfather
farmer did to teach his grandchildren
and neighbors. It was too much of a
child. There were about fifty of them.
There was no teacher trained, she
was a sister of my grandfather, Ana
Alves da Conceição. She taught, how
do you say ... private. At that time
there was no, my son! The task was
to know how to read and, knowing
how to do it, was 'good'! (Santos,
2012).
The narrative brought by Raimunda
led us to reflect on the initiatives of the
farmers who often assumed the expenses
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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with the buildings of the schools and/or
release of physical space in the buildings
already installed in their property. They
were also responsible for the provision of
accommodation for teachers and other
necessary resources not assumed by the
State (Lima, 2013). Raimunda's testimony
reveals the ways in which teachers were
hired at a time when, in the absence of
public competition
xiii
, the positions were
occupied.
“... I lived with my husband and it was a
very painful life”: the feminization of
the magisterium in rural Sergipe
The primary teachers were chosen
by mayors, councilors, farmers and other
figures who held power locally. Professor
Maria Lurdes Barreto narrated her
memoirs about the hiring of her first
teacher in the town of Maniçoba, now the
municipality of Nossa Senhora de
Aparecida, located in Agreste Central of
Sergipe:
This farmer of Tanque Novo, he got
teachers from outside. He would go
there to teach that people, to teach
what he knew. There was no one
trained, there was none of that. It was
at the base ... 'In the land of the blind
the one who has an eye is a king'.
(Barreto, 2013).
On this same point, teacher Maria
Lima Santos Aragão recalled:
Here there was a teacher, Mrs.
Erozina. After she left, the people
were left without a teacher for all
those people from that region to
bring their children. Then, his ‘Zé’
[farmer] went and got the first
teachers that were from the city:
Cassilda, then came a Janice. I've
already studied them. They did not
get used to living in the fields. Then
he got a teacher, Maria da Conceição
Souza Pinto, who was my third
teacher in Várzea Nova. We have so
much to thank and pray for her soul,
for she was in charge of a single
room every year. (Aragon, 2012).
Another difficulty for the work of the
teachers, compromising the income of the
teaching that they ministered, resided in
the existence of multisseriados
xiv
classes.
Also called unidocent and/or multigraduate
classes, this amalgamation of students of
different levels in a single classroom was a
striking feature of rural education in
Sergipe. This memory was not restricted to
the testimony of Professor Maria Lima,
because Maria José Santos Freitas, 80,
remembering her memories of being a
student in private school in São Mateus,
Telha municipality, located in Baixo São
Francisco, also reported to the multisseries
class: “Professor Antonia did not have a
teacher's degree. He was a person who
knew a little and that little passed to those
who did not know anything. All the little
children in a single room.” (Freitas, 2012).
Possibly, Professor Antonia would have
appropriated the rudiments of reading,
writing, and calculus, and was considered,
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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at that time and place, a person of
notorious knowledge, even though she did
not graduate from the Rui Barbosa Normal
School
xv
, located in the Sergipe capital.
Another narrative that helps us to better
understand these aspects is that of teacher
Maria Odete Vieira dos Santos, 83, when
she testified about the working conditions
of his first teacher, “Laudiceia”, in the
town of Sítios Novos, municipality of
Canhoba, located in the middle Sergipe
Sergipe in the late 1930s:
... at this time, she was a teacher from
here called Laudiceia. She was
staying at my house. She was very
affectionate to my mother and father
... it was only this school she had in
the village. The name of the school
was Isolada, at that time nobody was
formed here. At that time I did not
prepare my non-lesson, in the time I
studied. They were the books,
because the books came with answers
... [The school] was a big hall. In that
school there was a kitchen, there was
everything. And she made food for
her to eat at home, now she slept in
my father's house, that they were
afraid to sleep in school only ... They
[the teachers] went from here to the
city, they arrived in the interior and
were afraid to sleep alone in the
House. Then my father's house had
five rooms, then dad would go and
give them a room so they could sleep
... When he had a green corn daddy
would give. They were treated like a
princess in the interior. A teacher in
the interior had a value, today is a
serious thing, but I think she still has
a lot of respect. (Santos, 2013).
The memories evoked by the
teachers Maria José and Maria Odete give
us to see the working conditions of the
teachers in the rural environment. Often,
they work completely alone, in isolated
locations. In addition, the precariousness of
their training must be considered and the
distance between the school and the
Department of Education, which was
located in urban perimeters. Almeida
(2001), in her dissertation entitle Voices
forgotten in rural horizons: teachers'
storie, when she studied primary teachers
in Rio Grande do Sul, thought “... in
‘forgotten voices’, forgotten in the past,
perhaps forgotten in the present.” (p. 230).
In her study, she identified that it is not by
chance that many teachers, recalling their
memories, refer to the solitude and
renunciation that accompanied them in
their work in schools located in rural areas.
As a result of the transportation conditions,
the teachers were housed in the school
itself or in the houses of the people of the
community. It is possible that the
strengthening of ties with the community
was reinforced, precisely considering the
solitude in which they lived, as was the
case of teacher Laudiceia and others of her
time.
Notwithstanding these adverse
conditions, Moraes (2014) warns us that
we must consider the cultural identity of
the rural teacher. This was because there
was the possibility that, depending on the
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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conditions, the teacher would be deprived
of the cultural environment to which he
belonged and consequently be led to live in
a cultural environment with which he had
no identity when he did not dislike it. The
teacher should start his career by the
isolated rural school, considered as an
early stage of the teaching career. Only
after a certain period had been completed
could he be removed to an urban school. In
the state of Sergipe, the governor Eronides
Ferreira de Carvalho, in a message dated
1936, denounced this situation:
The first appointments are for villages,
and the second, for successive
promotions, for the villas, cities and
Capital. Most of the settlements are in
places where social life is full of
harshness, where comfort is something
unknown and where, sometimes, there is
not lack of the fears and perils of
banditry ... If in the interior the standard
of living is on the other hand, that
everything else conspires against the
neophyte educator who takes off for
Capital, in order to carry out the delicate
task of breaking into the conquests of
letters the intellingencias in the most
unfolding. It is not explained by the
logic that a village teacher, sometimes
deprived of her right to promotions and
rendering service identical to that
offered by one of the Capital, has such
lower incomes than this one. As a result
of this system that seems to me wrong,
comes the pediment of removals in
which there are only advantages for the
teacher and ills for teaching. Urge the
search for a means capable of removing
the evils that abate the stimuli worthy of
strengthening and generate the
disapproval of the career of the
magisterium. (Sergipe, 1936, 40).
The appointments referred to by
Governor Eronides Ferreira de Carvalho
concern the “access law
xvi
”, according to
which the teacher should start acting
within the state. Based on the research
carried out by Freitas (2003), who
analyzed the trajectory of ex-normalists
from 1920 to 1950, at the Escola Normal
Rui Barbosa in Aracaju, after graduating,
the normalist should follow: “First in a
first-class school situated in a hamlet. He
would then teach in a village considered
second choice. Then to the third entrant, in
a school situated in the city. After
successive promotions, he could teach in
the capital.” (Freitas, 2003, pp. 148-149).
Also according to this author, many were
the difficulties to get the fixation of the
teachers trained in the interior. In addition
to the family’s distance and low salaries,
some testimonies showed the fear of
Lampião. It is worth mentioning that some
families did not allow daughters to leave
the city and go alone to the interior of the
state of Sergipe, especially teachers
belonging to the highest strata of society.
The difficulties to carry out the
normal rural course, as well as the
intensive training courses, were due to the
fact that they were teachers with low
purchasing power and, for the most part,
married women and their families, which
made it difficult to travel to the places
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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where the courses were given. The
presence of women in primary rural
teaching is predominant in relation to
teachers. The female presence in the rural
area is justified because the profession of
teacher was considered lighter, hence the
fact that this work is assumed, in most
cases, by women. “Being a teacher is the
only work in the field that does not require
‘brute force’, characteristic of rural work
...” according to Rodrigues (1999, p. 58).
Figures 2 and 3, below, show the
prominence of the female figure in the
rural primary school:
Figure 2 - Rural teachers undergoing training in 1950. At the center Acrísio Cruz and José Rollemberg Leite.
Source: Sergipe. Report of the Rural Teacher Training Course (1950).
Figure 3 - Acrísio Cruz (in the center) with students and teacher of a rural school, carrying hoes for the work in
the gardens (1950).
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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Source: Photographic collection of the historian Luiz Antônio Barreto.
The feminization of rural primary
teaching was not a phenomenon that
occurred specifically in Sergipe, because it
is recurrent in almost all national territory,
due to the low salaries paid to a primary
school teacher. According to Souza (1998),
the replacement of males in primary
education by females was due to a process
that began in the 19th century. From that
moment on, women’s activities in the
educational field gained prominence. They
finally found a trade that “patriarchal
society” consented to, since primary
education dealt with the elementary
education of children, and women would
have, moreover, more patience and
affability with them, because of their
maternal nature. Even educators receiving
derisory salary were an opportunity for
women to emerge in the job market by
showing their skills. He reinforces this
analysis (Souza, 1998, p. 51), when he
states:
The use of women's work in the field
of education was gaining strength
everywhere in the late nineteenth
century, in view of the need to
reconcile the recruitment of a large
number of professionals, to attend to
the diffusion of popular education,
keeping little wages attractive for
men. On the other hand, it would
become one of the first ‘respectable’
professional fields open to women’s
activity by the standards of the time.
(Souza, 1998, p. 51).
The social role of the selfless woman
crossed the narratives of the teachers
interviewed. Professor Raimunda Alves
dos Santos said about this aspect: “I was
very attached to my mother and the
students. My vocation was to stay with my
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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mother. I never wanted to get married, my
teacher’s husband already had a fame to
lean against.” (Santos, 2012). The narrative
of the teacher makes us think about the
figure of “Quincas
xvii
”, the typical husband
of the teacher who did not work and lived
at her expense. It is necessary to take into
account that the teachers had a fixed
salary, although low, compared to the one
of the man, free housing and a relative
social prestige, among other benefits,
perhaps for that reason attracting the figure
of “Quincas”. The teacher Maria Odete
Vieira dos Santos narrated in detail:
... look, when I told you that I started
teaching at my house, I lived with my
husband and it was a very painful life.
He was very bad to me, but I give him to
God every day in my prayers, because
maybe if he was not so bad with me, I
would not have become more attached
to God, as I clung. So I taught my
students and when they arrived Friday I
prayed the rosary. Once upon a time, he
lived at my expense. Then had it once he
was at home, was in the bedroom lying
down and I was teaching, that the school
was indoors. I threw the boys around me
and went to pray. And the little animals
so innocent. My tear came down,
because I knew that when the boys went
away he would fight and I would not
fight. (Santos, 2013).
The narrative of teacher Maria Odete
Vieira dos Santos shows the relationship
between her private and public life, since
the plots between the conjugal and
teacheral life were mixed in the daily life
of the school house. The fact that the
teachers live and work in the same local
also leads us to think about working
conditions. In addition to the tasks inherent
to teaching, such as class preparation,
teaching and control of student discipline,
according to Lima and Assis (2013, p.
315), the teacher in rural areas “…was
responsible for cleaning of school, school
deeds and, at times, the making of snacks
and other extracurricular activities.”
Raimunda Alves dos Santos narrated how
the school lunch was made at the Cruzeiro
rural school, located in the municipality of
Poço Verde, south-central Sergipe:
I used to prepare the snacks. So I
would send rice, I would send milk.
To make milk rice. I had no servant.
The lunch box was me. The servant
myself, or my nieces who swept, had
nothing. Water, not even water. We
used to have to go get water in the
tank for the boys to drink. I suffered.
(Santos, 2012).
In addition to teaching, Raimunda
taught other functions, such as lunch box,
caretaker, concierge, among others. These
roles were also pointed out by Maria Luiza
Barbosa da Silva, when she was a teacher
at the Sebastião Marques Rural School,
Poço Redondo, Sergipe High Sertão: “...
after school lunch, we had to do it
ourselves.” (Silva, 2011). In this way, we
can see that the place occupied by the
teachers in their schools conferred local
representativeness to them, since they were
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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polyvalent subjects, whose activities varied
between the professorial practices and
many other attributions. On the typical
school menu of the place, the teacher
Josefina Sotero Santos Teles narrated: “In
the rural school the teacher herself made
the snack. When they did not have them,
they would take the homecook, baked
potato, baked potato, whatever the mother
had put in the bag.” (Teles, 2013). The
narratives of the teachers once again lead
us to think about working conditions in
rural primary school in Sergipe. The
teacher Maria Lita Silveira described the
conditions of work in rural areas:
... it was a mud stick house. I started to
teach, I had no energy. He had to buy a
lamp, call a lamp, and put the cotton
and kerosene wick. I would teach all
day and give at night. I taught adults.
That's how I started working. Then I
came on horseback, pass the river full,
had a flood, once even the horse took a
step took me with horse and
everything. I just left because God did
not want me to die on that day. I
almost died. (Silveira, 2012).
According to the deponents, at the
time they started teaching, it was very
difficult to appoint teachers to the rural
area, first because of the precarious
working conditions in that area and then
because of the low salaries they were
offered. However, they mentioned that the
community had respect and great
consideration by the teacher, even though
they were mostly lay teachers, with only
the 4th grade completed. Professor
Etemízia Ramos Batista de Andrade
mentioned the receptivity of the rural
community Pita, municipality of São
Cristóvão, Grande Aracaju region:
... was a wonderful people, an orderly
people, a friendly people. They said,
‘You’re the president here. ‘I was at
school with my mother ... The students
wept when I left, cried a lot, I cried
myself. At night they would get there,
those people with a pipe in their mouths.
The tabargues said, ‘Let’s make
company for a teacher that she's alone
with her mother.’ They got there, telling
stories of stride to distract. I was very
present. I did not buy anything from
greenery. At Pita, people used to plant a
lot, it was tomatoes, onions, lettuce,
eggs. In the morning the people would
bring me a plate of porridge. (Andrade,
2013).
Teacher Josefa de Andrade Fontes
also referred to the respect and receptivity
of the rural community in Botequim,
municipality of Santa Luzia Itanhy, south-
central sergipe:
... there was a place of drunk people,
none of them touched me. In my
school, no one ever came close
because they respected it. I went to
rural school, they gave me a horse. I
got very used to my students, one
slept with me at night. I was not
afraid, the staff was good to me.
(Sources, 2015).
Teacher Maria José de Carvalho
Eleotério also emphasized the same aspect:
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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... I would leave my children and I
would receive the money, when I arrived
at home, without any penny, which had
no money. I spent two years. He did not
get a penny. Then they gave me some
advice to collect from their parents.
Then I said, ‘Look, I do not want to
charge, because six, eight, fifteen, can
you afford to pay and others who do
not?' So, when I charge one, I'll have to
charge all I do not want enmity. It is
better for me to teach for free and you
do what you like. Oxente! I did not lack
flour, I did not lack beans. They took
what they had. It was fish everywhere, it
was shrimp, it was crab, it was bean.
When I got here, I would give a friend
who had a brunette. It was macaxeira, it
was yam. I did not lack anything and I
raised lots of chickens, I did not lack,
but money in my hand I never saw.
(Eleotério, 2013).
In the interviews, we noticed that in
some cases, when there was adaptation,
this situation was made pleasant by the
hosts' affection and by the dispute waged
by the students to have the teacher in their
home, evidencing how important that
teacher was in rural communities.
Regarding the route and transportation, the
interviewees reported that to reach school
they had to walk long distances on foot or
on horseback; there were also those who
resided temporarily in the student's house
or in the house reserved for the teacher.
When the school had this accommodation,
it was located in the same school building,
now in a nearby house, which avoided the
wear and tear of the long walk to work.
Professor Maria Odete Vieira dos Santos
quoted this point: “I lived inside the
school. He had a living room and a
teaching room. When I came home, I
would go back on horseback, because there
was no car there. I took two companies,
two sisters.” (Santos, 2013). Professor
Laudiceia Rodrigues Cerqueira described
her walk to the rural school Lagoa de
Dentro, Arauá municipality, located in
southern Sergipe:
... when I went to rural school in the
village Lagoa de Dentro I left twelve
thirty for an hour I'm there. The class
started an hour, sometimes it was out
before twelve. Then I got pregnant
walking here pregnant. Then the mayor
told me to stay here in the same town,
my friend – ‘Comadre is not going to
walk anymore. She will stay here in the
city group.’ (Cerqueira, 2011).
Teacher Maria José de Carvalho
Eleotério also told of her strenuous walk to
the rural school Sapé, municipality of
Itaporanga D’Ajuda, Grande Aracaju
territory:
... I moved to Rural School Rita Cacete
with my children and her husband. Then
I went to the Felisbelo Freire School
Group. It’s a group from here. Then I
asked for a transfer. In Sapé, I asked for
a transfer because it was far from my
house. You know if the person wants the
best you have to go look for it. I worked,
I did not win. My poor mother, how was
I going to live my life without seeing a
penny in my hand? Two years without
receiving. Every month I went to Sao
Cristovao and I got there and said, ‘I do
not have it!’ Then he would come back
to his feet. He got up and got back on his
feet, he did not have the money to take
the suburban. (Eleotério, 2013).
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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The lack of transportation allied to
the conditions of pedagogical training,
work and salary conditions form a set of
characteristics that also configure the rural
primary school in Sergipe. To become a
rural teacher is not dissociated, therefore,
from social, material, intellectual, and time
and place conditions, since teachers are
possessors of histories, individualities,
experiences, names, identities. Thus, it is
not possible to speak in a generic rural
teacher, it is necessary to understand the
life history of women like Maria, Odete,
Josefa, Raimunda, among many others
forgotten in history.
Final considerations
In fact, we believe that the entry into
the life history of retired teachers, in view
of work, school and the trajectory in the
magisterium through the interstices opened
through the narratives, provided a meeting
of the reader with several women and
everyday. In this way, it is because of the
peculiarities found in the life history of the
teachers that we highlight the regional
differences and the particularities of the
state, thus avoiding the use of the word
Brazil to refer to a homogeneous whole.
We want to leave our perceptions
here. Among the first, we see the
feminization of the primary rural teaching
as a phenomenon present in Brazil, since it
is recurrent in almost all the national
territory, due to the low salaries paid to a
teacher of primary education. We can also
perceive a Sergipe social situation marked
by the neglect of the Public Power in
relation to the “rural poor man”, with
outdated instruments in agricultural work
and improper conditions of health of the
dwellings. As a result, other social
problems, such as the rural exodus, the
scarcity of medical, sanitary and hygienic
resources, the lack of roads and roads,
among other expressions of economic,
political and social precariousness were
added.
The experiences of the teachers
allow us to see signs of abandonment,
isolation and forgetfulness by the Public
Powers. Since the initiatives of the State
were translated into actions that did not
meet the needs of the rural environment,
because, through the narratives, we can
conjecture that, at the beginning of the
20th century, there was abandonment of
these rural populations, who remained
disengaged, away from the improvements
public investments focused on the model
of urbanization that emerged in the country
at that time. However, rural schools played
in this regard, despite the precariousness of
their facilities and the training of their
teachers, an important role in the
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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institutionalization of primary education in
Sergipe.
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i
Interviews provided by the teachers, based on the
Letter of Assignment of Rights, providing on the
rights and duties of the interviewee, as well as the
clarification on the use of interviews for academic
research purposes. The interviews were recorded in
audio and video and properly transcribed in
Microsoft Word 2010, its duration totaling
approximately 32 hours. They are stored in the
digital collection that will constitute the Memory
Center of Sergipe Education, together with 129
other audiovisual interviews resulting from the
other subprojects.
ii
Term used by Moraes (2014), when analyzing the
absences, exclusions and differentiations that
characterized rural primary education in São Paulo
(1933-1968).
iii
Small area of arable land.
iv
Antonio Alves de Souza, born in Saco Torto,
town of Itabaiana, state of Sergipe. He became one
of the most well-known and outstanding
cangaceiros of the band of Lampião. Volta Seca, as
it was called, composed, between the years of 1950
and 1957, several songs that are linked to the cycle
of cangaceiros, as if I knew, Sabino and Lampião,
Woman rendeira, Acorda Maria Bonita and others.
In this regard, see Barreto (2009).
v
At the beginning of the 20th century, this image
would be crystallized in the well-known character
of Monteiro Lobato, the Jeca Tatu. In the article
Old plague, written for the Estado de São Paulo
newspaper in 1914, and later published in the book
Urupês, Lobato accuses caboclo of parasite, of
destroyer, of lice of the earth. Jeca is represented in
the children's and youth literature as a destitute hick
in the archaic Brazilian countryside. This is because
he is the image of being at the mercy of diseases
typical of backward countries, misery and
economic backwardness. See Zarth (2007).
vi
Rice cultivation.
vii
Monteiro Lobato ideas brought the discussion
about the need to impress on the broken, filthy,
malnourished, grotesque Brazilian, a sense of
belonging to his homeland and civility. According
to him: “The cerebral furniture of Jeca, apart the
juicy filling of superstitions, is worth the one of the
hovel. The three-foot stool, the gourds, the bacon
hook, the troughs, all re-enact within their brains in
the form of ideas” (Lobato, 2007, p. 174). From the
end of the decade of 1950, the caipira could be
represented in fiction. From that moment, a
retelling of Jeca Tatu, a character created by
Monteiro Lobato, began to be shown in Brazilian
cinema, mainly by the films of Mazzaropi. In this
regard, see Moraes (2014).
viii
Typical construction of popular houses in the
Brazilian Northeast, consists of walls made of clay
supported by interlocking sticks.
ix
Identified in the legend of the original
photograph.
x
Then Director of Public Instruction of the State of
Sergipe.
xi
The ox cart, typical transport of the Northeast,
consists of a structure pulled by a joint of four or
six cattle and directed by a path. The animals are
stung by a caller, usually a child, who, in front of
the car, calls the oxen by their names. The ox cart
transported the crops to the farm yards or to the
grocery stores, and the raw materials for the place
of the industries.
xii
According to Camelo (1992), Sergipe received
numerous visits from Lampião and his band, mainly
in the 1930s. Lampião was accused of having
committed the greatest atrocities of his life in the
cangaço in Sergipe. Still according to the author,
Lampião was received with parties in the Sergipe
cities of Aquidabã and Capela in 1929. Lampião
died in Sergipe in 1938, near the municipality of
Piranhas, state of Alagoas, more precisely in the
grotto of Angicos.
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
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xiii
The Law of March 5, 1835 instituted a public
competition for the teaching profession. See
Mendonça (1958).
xiv
The multi-serialized classes are characterized by
reuniting in a same physical space different series
that are managed by the same teacher. They are, for
the most part, the only option for residents of rural
communities to have access to the school system.
The multi-serialized classes function in schools
built by the government or by the communities
themselves, or in churches, community barracks,
clubs, teachers' homes, among other places less
suitable for an effective teaching-learning process.
See Ximenes-Rocha and Colares (2013); Pinho e
Souza (2010).
xv
In the state of Sergipe, the formation of teachers
for Primary School was, for a long time, under the
responsibility of the Rui Barbosa Normal School,
located in Aracaju, the state capital. This state
institution was founded in 1870, having a
provisional existence. The institution only gained
identity and regularity from 1911, when the
Government Rodrigues Dórea created the building
in Praça Olímpio Campos, where the course
remained until 1957, when it was transferred to
another building, located in Laranjeiras Street, a
peripheral district of Aracaju. Other institutions
begin to offer the normal course, maintained by
religious orders that arise in Aracaju (1925) and
inner cities (Propriá, Estância), attending above all
to the elite and middle class girls. See Freitas
(2003).
xvi
“Access Law”: normalization of the entrance of
the primary teacher in the exercise of the state
public teaching in Sergipe. According to this law,
they should start the career in the interior and go
through successive promotions until the transfer to
the Capital. See Freitas (2003).
xvii
Machado's literature brings the figure of
“Quincas” as the husband of the teacher who lives
unoccupied, without profession.
Article Information
Received on May 8th, 2018
Accepted on June 19th, 2018
Published on December 23th, 2018
Author Contributions: The author Rony Rei do
Nascimento Silva was responsible for the elaboration,
analysis and interpretation of the data; The author Ilka
Miglio de Mesquita was responsible for writing and
reviewing the contents of the manuscript. The authors
were also responsible for approving the final version
published.
Conflict of Interest: None reported.
Orcid
Rony Rei do Nascimento Silva
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2195-9459
Ilka Miglio de Mesquita
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5071-2415
How to cite this article
APA
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes
and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural
Sergipe (1930-1950). Rev. Bras. Educ. Camp., 3(4), 1345-
1371. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.20873/uft.2525-
4863.2018v3n4p1345
ABNT
SILVA, R. R. N.; MESQUITA, I. M. Women with hoes and
pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950). Rev. Bras. Educ. Camp., Tocantinópolis, v.
3, n. 4, set./dez., p. 1345-1371, 2018. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.20873/uft.2525-4863.2018v3n4p1345
Silva, R. R. N., & Mesquita, I. M. (2018). Women with hoes and pencils in hand: stories of primary teachers in rural Sergipe
(1930-1950)…
Tocantinópolis
v. 3
n. 4
p. 1344-1370
sep./dec.
2018
ISSN: 2525-4863
1370