This article is the result of a study accomplished with three female heads of family living in a popular neighborhood in a town of the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. When investigating how gender meanings are constructed in the life trajectory of those women, we sought to reflect how those meanings locate the subjects in the plot of social and gender relations. Considering the historical, social and cultural construction of gender, the naturalization of the linking between sex and gender - so frequent in psychology - and the resulting regulation in the constitution of female and male subjectivities deriving from it can be questioned. The results point to the existence of permanencies such as the strong presence of sexual moral and the high value attributed by them to motherhood. They reveal, however, alternatives for carrying out small ruptures in that pattern when creating, from the appropriation of other knowledges and other significations for their own experiences, a new platform of expectations and possibilities in their lives.
gender; female family heads; trajectories of life