Between Home and Factory: Representations of Working Women in the Labor Press of Belo Horizonte (1900-1905)

Abstract

The article analyzes the representations of gender, labor, and education in the workers’ press of Belo Horizonte between 1900 and 1905, based on the newspapers O Operário (1900 and 1903-1905), linked to the Workers’ League and the Workers’ Center of the state capital. The objective is to understand how these periodicals, produced mostly by men, constructed discourses about working women within the context of the formation of the urban labor market and the first experiences of workers’ organization during Brazil’s First Republic. The research, qualitative in nature and grounded in documentary and historical-discursive analysis, engages with gender and feminist studies (Scott, 1995; Rago, 2014; Gonzalez, 2020). The findings indicate that, although these newspapers presented themselves as instruments of social emancipation, they reproduced patriarchal and bourgeois values, limiting women’s roles to the domestic sphere and to private morality. Women appear represented as muses, “angels of the home,” or “shrews,” and rarely as political and productive subjects. It is concluded that the workers’ press in Belo Horizonte expressed a masculine and exclusionary view of the working feminine class.