Women, black women and ethnic-racial configurations at the Escola Normal de Caetité, Bahia, Brazil (1898-1943)^*

Abstract

This text presents a reading about the presence of women in the Escola Normal de Caetité, Bahia, Brazil (1898-1943) in an effort to break with narratives, in school legislation and curricula, which describe them as submissive teachers, executing tasks prescribed by men. When resuming documents from the Municipal Public Archive, from the Escola Normal de Caetité and from retired teachers in a historical-discursive path located in gender studies, which involved reading copies of the Jornal A Penna and of photographs, the text problematizes policies of silencing in two temporalities, that of the documents of the period 1898-1943 and that of the archives that organize the narratives of the Normal School in the present time, to bring out experiences of protagonism of women in the teaching profession. This period marks the beginning of teacher training in Caetité and extends till the end of the activities of Jornal A Penna, one of the sources of this study. The educational scenes that the documents in the archives reveal allow us to affirm that the Escola Normal emerged sexist, classist and racist as a symptom of a State constituted in these same nuances. To exist as a woman and as a black woman meant resisting different oppressions. It concludes by arguing that the creative ways of the women of the Escola Normal de Caetité contributed to resist the silencing policies of the Upper Sertão region of Bahia from the second half of the 20th century and should appear in the local archives as a condition of possibility for textual productions sustaining forms of protagonism marked by gendered and racialized experiences.

Teacher training; Gender; Silencing policies; Race