The legal creation of the girls’ first letters classes

The general law of October 15, 1827 predicted the possibility and defined the general characteristics of the female class. Its articles determined the criteria for creating chairs; they defined salaries and possible teacher bonuses; indicated the method of preference; signaled a few material questions regarding building and utensils; determined the knowledge that should be taught; explicit the form of teacher provision and recruitment; they defined the post of public teacher of first letters as lifelong; and pointed out that the punishments should be those of the Lancaster method. ^{Adriana M. P. Silva (2007}) considers that the law of October 15 defined the factor ‘population’ as the main criterion for creating classes of first letters. The possibility of opening classes both in cities and in villages and parishes - and the absence of a defined minimum number of inhabitants - opened up to the demands of the population and negotiations between local and provincial powers. ^{Cynthia Greive Veiga (2007}) considers that, with regard to the application of legal prescriptions, there was no uniformity in the different provinces. For ^{José Gondra and Alessandra Schueler (2008}, p. 53), this law ratified the organization of elementary public education in the form of “[…] schools of reading, writing, counting and believing […]”, already contemplated in the royal classes³⁶.

However, as far as content is concerned, the imperial law of 1827 provided for a small increase in relation to the royal classes, through Article 6. It included the teaching of “[…] practices of broken, decimals and proportions” (^{Brasil, 1827}). Such knowledge was related to marketing by weight, measures and product values; were therefore useful in business practices among other activities in the world of work. Geometry was added that was related to the practices in construction and agriculture. The teaching of the grammar of the national language and the suggestion of the ‘Constitution of the Empire’ and ‘History of Brazil’, as readings, indicates the concern with the establishment of a national language and the formation of the citizen for the consolidation of a Nation-State. ^{Hilsdorf (2003}, p. 44) considers that the law of 1827 represented a “[…] maintenance of public single classes of first letters of Pombaline origin”. The author highlights the inclusion of girls and the adoption of the mutual method as innovations.

In three short articles, women’s school education was inaugurated legally, five years after the country’s political emancipation. The three specific articles created the classes, defined the knowledge to be taught and ordered of the teachers. The creation of the chairs was conditional on the population criterion (such as the men’s) and the judgment of the provinces’ presidents in Council. Article 12 presents the gender differences. The knowledge provided in the first letter schools had been object of article 6, however, after announcing the creation of the female classes in article 11, the law presents an adequacy of teaching materials. This adjustment begins with the exclusion of ‘Geometry’ and the limitation of arithmetic to the four operations (^{Brasil, 1827}, p. 71) ³⁷ in girls’ classes. Regarding the remuneration, the same salaries were foreseen for female and male teachers - an equity that is worth noting because of the lack of marked asymmetry in gender relations in the period.

The law of 1827 was conceived within a paternalistic and unequal society in which the insertion of women into public literate spaces³⁸ was slow, tutored and faced resistance. However, there were women who worked dynamically in public spaces, such as the streets of the city, inserted into the world of work as laundresses, dressers, grocers, quitters, midwives, seamstresses and other crafts. In the classic study entitled Quotidiano e poder em São Paulo no século XIX, ^{Maria Odila LS Dias (1995})³⁹ investigates “[…] poor women, alone or heads of families” (^{Dias 1995}, p. 8) and their agencies in the world of work and asks how they were looking for survival and that of their dependents. There was an iconsphere of the “[…] feminine closure in the domestic space […]” that contrasted with “[…] a complex framework of differentiated social positions and functions […]” giving “[…] visibility to the multiplicity of experiences of the feminine in the period” (^{Gouvêa, 2003}, p. 5). In the thesis that gave rise to the present study, we outline the contours of the world of women’s work, in which we highlight the various possibilities of being a woman who populated the experiences in São Paulo of the nineteen century, with the profound social, gender and racial inequalities of a slave country (^{Munhoz, 2018}, ).

The feminine presence in the world of work was amplified at the time of the creation of the girls’ classes, a project officially elaborated exclusively by men in a context in which women were considered inferior and lived, almost always, under male guardianship. In discussions of the Constituent Assembly, prior to the 1824 Constitution, the theme of girls’ instruction was present. For the Constituent Assembly, an education commission was elected⁴⁰.

Martim Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada had written, in 1816, a proposal for reform of minor studies in Sao Paulo that served as a guide for such a commission. The deputy Maciel da Costa (Marquês de Queluz) suggested that instruction be offered to the “[…] Brazilian youth [...] of both sexes […]”, since he considered that the Assembly did not intend “[…] to exclude women from the benefit of public education [and that...] to deprive such a large and interesting part of the human race, destined by nature and society to such important functions, was a grave inconvenience” (^{Sessão da Assembleia Constituinte, 1823}, p. 55-56). The draft Constitution⁴¹ was not approved, but the proposal was taken up by the Commission that proposed the general law of Public Instruction of 1827. The deputies defended women’s education by arguing “[…] the usefulness and necessity of the good education of women […]” and emphasized that “[…] ordinarily Brazilian women endowed with talent [were] condemned to the deepest ignorance, being deprived even of those first principles of public morality, indispensable for being good mothers of families” (Excerpt from the deputy Romualdo de Seixas, Sessão da Câmara Geral dos Deputados, 16/06/1826 apud ^{Rodrigues, 1962}, p. 65). The offer of public instruction to the female population was aimed at overcoming superstitions and creeds, in the eyes of these rulers and their liberal principles.

There was the encouragement of female instruction in a format that outlined a school-based version of the moral codes of gender conduct that permeated society - as in any historical period - in which the social roles of ‘family mothers’ and wife were at the center. The law indicated the substitution of some knowledge - in relation to male classes - according to the social patterns of gender. Instead of “[…] practices of broken numbers, decimals, and proportions [and] more general notions of practical geometry […]” (intended for boys) - teachers should teach their pupils “[…] gifts that serve the domestic economy” (^{Brasil, 1827}, p. 71). There was no specific definition of what such gifts would be, but the practices were mainly in the teaching of sewing and embroidery. The theme is significant in the history of the feminine teaching of São Paulo and, therefore, it is object of interpretation in the item that follows.

Domestic gifts in first letter classes in the province of São Paulo

In 1854, the district inspector of Sorocaba asked the general inspector of the Public Instruction what the ‘gifts’ were, who answered that they were “[…] needlework, embroidery, etc.” (Ofício do inspector de Sorocaba…, 1854)⁴². A quarrel around the teaching of domestic gifts in the public feminine teaching of São Paulo had begun much earlier. The question pervaded the practices of several teachers and the inspection of public instruction, as ^{Leda Rodrigues (1962}, p. 83) pointed out.

It is interesting to note the insistence with which both the District inspectors, the district attorneys, the General Inspector and the Presidents of the Province insisted that the teachers dedicate themselves carefully and carefully to the teaching of needlework.

^{Leda Rodrigues (1962}) devoted herself to research on female education in São Paulo - from the colonial period to the Proclamation of the Republic and inventoried sources that indicated the presence of girls and women in school education processes between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries from a diachronic perspective. Many of the documentary references and questions were taken up by the historiography of São Paulo education.

Maria Lúcia Hisldorf, in her research on teacher Benedita (^{Hilsdorf, 1997}), in her studies on the Educators’ Seminar (^{Hilsdorf, 2010}), points out that the first mention, the absence of teaching gifts in the classes of the teacher of the city of São Paulo, in the sources, was held in the manuscript letter sent by the then director of the Seminary, Eliziária Cezília Espínola⁴³, in September, 1829. The Seminário de Educandas was an establishment created in 1825 during the presidency of Lucas Monteiro de Barros (1^st president of the province). For ^{Hilsdorf (2010}), this is one of the actions of the illustrated liberal philanthropy of the province of São Paulo⁴⁴. The director’s manuscript reported on the Commission’s survey appointed by the House and brought a claim for salary increase by comparing the values of her salary and that of Benedita da Trindade, the first public teacher in the province, as well as the comparison between the works carried out by each one; Eliziária Espínola regretted that she received only 76$800 réis a year to feed, dress, give religious education, teach girls “[…] to read, write, count, bake, spin, sieve, embroider, make nets, make flowers […]”, and still performed the works of revenue, expense, and list writing that she was required to send each quarter as a director; while the teacher taught “[…] only reading, writing and nothing else […]” and enjoyed vacation and holidays (such as Thursdays) receiving an annual salary of 300$000 (^{Ofício de Eliziária Cezília Espínola, 1829})⁴⁵.

The city of São Paulo was, in the middle of the 19^th century, a small urban area with a little more than 22,000 inhabitants (^{Muller, 1923}). The director of the Seminary in 1829, Eliziária Espinola, knew not only the value of the salary of the public teacher, but also what she taught (or did not teach) in her classes. If the first information was accessible in newspapers, as it appeared in the minutes of the session of the House and in documents of the provincial government that were published in the scarce and incipient periodicals; the second was probably information obtained from orality in relationships and secret talks. The point is that the absence of the gifts was not initially the object of a complaint of the inspection of the Instruction, but was informed in a demand of a ‘work colleague’, as an argument to justify her request for increase. Just over three years later, teacher Benedita herself (^{Ofício de Benedita Trindade do Lado de Christo, 1833a}) reported that

The manner in which I give effect to Art. 12 of the Law of November 15⁴⁶ of 1827, it is incumbent upon me to inform Your Excellency that I am ready to teach girls (never less than 50 effectively) 2 hours in the morning and as many as in the afternoon according to the Law on every working day, including the teaching of reading, writing, arithmetically speaking, the grammar of the national language, the principles of Christan Moral, and the doctrine of the Religion of the Empire: I also make them read the Political Constitution and the Geographic part of it, I cannot apply the girls to this study for the History of Brazil for lack of this work. Finally, I do not neglect to teach them everything that can make them good daughters of the same Empire and good mothers of families. I have offered to inform Your Excellency. May God always keep Your Excellency. São Paulo. February 5, 1833.

Article 12 was what replaced geometry with gifts. Curiously, although Benedita da Trindade states that she is going to explain ‘the manner in which I give effect to Art. 12’, she did not mention the gifts. But, unlike Eliziária Espinola stated, the city’s teacher insisted on registering that she taught much more than just ‘reading and writing’. She listed all the other knowledge required by law, except for gifts, starting with reading, writing and arithmetic, passing through religion, politics and geography and justifying the absence of history due to lack of textbooks. For the teacher, teaching ‘everything that can make girls good daughters of the Empire and good mothers of the family’ meant teaching reading, writing, etc. and did not include sewing, embroidery and the like. Indirect insinuations such as those of the first director of the Seminário de Educandas, more explicit denunciations and questions about the subject occurred since 1829 advancing throughout the decades of 1830 to 1850. It was possible to locate a set of records referring to the complaint of the gifts, between 1829 and 1858, in the chairs of the Sé and in other girls’ classes. The only case prior to the 1850s is that of Benedita da Trindade.

In the majority, the charges and complaints stand out so that article 12 of the law of October 15, 1827 was fulfilled and the gifts effectively taught. Between the end of 1832 and the beginning of 1833, the City Council of São Paulo - which was responsible for supervising public education⁴⁷ - registered the first questions to the professor of the Sé about the absence. On this occasion, not teaching the gifts seemed not to cause great controversy, although its teaching was already provided by law. The ‘failure’ was identified, but the justifications presented - lack of time or lack of knowledge about what knowledge included - were accepted; at least by a portion of the members of the inspection.

On March 26, 1832, a ‘Regulation for the teachers of the Province of São Paulo’ had been approved. This regulation is important because it contains instructions directed specifically to teachers of first letters from São Paulo, and also because one of its articles has been literally quoted by Professor Benedita da Trindade. In May 1833, in an answer to a letter of May 8, which questioned her about the absence, the teacher Benedita da Trindade (^{Ofício de Benedita Trindade do Lado de Cristo, 1833b}, emphasis added) wrote explicitly:

Governing myself in the teaching of my pupils by the Regulation given by the Excellency Government of this Province, dated March 26, 1832, that on April 11 of the same year I was informed by the Municipal Council ‘not to teach the necessary gifts to the domestic economy provided for in Article 12 of the Law of 15 of october, because they are excluded by the content of Article 3 of the same Regulation that goes together in copy’.

‘However, if Your Excellency considers it right that I should teach these gifts, I will execute your Orders with the same zeal and activity with which I have hitherto served’. God Save Your Excellency for many years.

São Paulo May 13, 1833.

Benedita da Trindade - Professor of Girls’s School (Emphasis added).

The teacher’s response indicates that in 1833 it was possible to negotiate the teaching of domestic gifts. To legitimize her justification, Benedita da Trindade copied article 3 of the “Regulation given by the Excellency Government of this Province of S. Paulo on March 25, 1832 to the Teachers of first letters” (^{Regulamento… 1832}) and attached to the letter of reply. According to the copy, the article stated that ‘Girls’ teachers should also teach the subjects referred to in Article 6 to the exclusion of those referred to in Article 12. When we look at this regulation, we find an ambiguity in the legislation. The Box 1 below lists, on the left, the transcription of articles 6 and 12 of the general law of 1827 and, on the right, the first three articles of the provincial regulation of 1832:

Source: ^{Munhoz (2018}, p. 122), (^{Brasil, 1827}, p. 71) e ^{O Novo Farol Paulistano (1832}, p. 1).

Box 1: Articles of the general law cited by the provincial regulation of March 26, 1832. 

Article 3 of the 1832 regulation dictated that teachers should teach the subjects of article 6 of the law of 1827: “[…] read, write, the four operations of arithmetic, practice of broken numbers, decimals and proportions, more general notions of geometry practice, the grammar of national language, and the principles of Christian morality and the doctrine of the Roman Catholic and apostolic religion” (^{Brasil, 1827}). It also determined the “[…] exclusion of the [subjects] ‘referred to in article 12’” (^{Brasil, 1827}, author’s emphasis). It is precisely in this section that one finds the ambiguity. Was the exclusion provided for in Article 3 of the 1832 Regulation a reiteration of the exclusion of the geometry of girls’ classes, already provided for in general law, or did it refer to the exclusion of domestic gifts, which was the subject added by this article? The social practices would have resulted in a provincial norm that returned to the first letter classes for the knowledge of reading, writing, arithmetic and religious doctrine or the provincial law would have reinforced the sewing, inside the schools, differentiating the knowledge according to the standards of gender behavior of the time?

Cunning and creative (^{Certeau, 1994}), teacher Benedita da Trindade used the regulation to justify the absence of the gifts in her classes. The difficulty in contemplating the teaching of the gifts in public classes of first letters of the Sé had already arisen and it was considered that the time was scarce for its teaching added to the one of the other subjects; thus, the cunning, the legal repertoire and the position of the teacher, added to the obstacles already faced for the effectiveness of the law could have justified its exclusion. The teacher knew the laws and followed their promulgations, mobilizing them to justify what she did not teach in her classes. Notwithstanding Benedita’s interpretation, the understanding that the regulation reinforced the exclusion of geometry is the most plausible, since it ordered to teach the subjects of article 6 of the law of 1827 to the exclusion of those of the same article 6 that were mentioned in the article 12, that is, ‘broken, decimals and proportions, the more general notions of practical geometry’. In this reading, the domestic gifts were not specifically regulated by the Paulista regulation.

The manner in which Benedita da Trindade put herself also allows us to speculate on a possible political position by choosing to follow provincial law (1832) and not general law (1827). This initial moment of the ‘domestic gifts quarrel’ unfolded in the time of the Regency in which the oppositions between provincials and centralists were recurrent in several provinces of the Empire (^{Mattos, 2004}). In the early 1840s, liberal revolts occurred in Minas Gerais and São Paulo, “[…] contrary to the centralist tendency that was consolidating in the country […]” understood by historiography as “[…] a liberal reaction against the conservative ‘return’ instituted mainly by the Law of Interpretation to the Additional Act and the Reform of the Criminal Code” (^{Oliveira, 2008}, p. 6, author’s emphasis). In this perspective, the teacher from São Paulo may have been a provincial who expressed her position through pedagogical practices⁴⁸. The participation of the teacher in the ‘Sociedade Sete de Setembro’ ⁴⁹ is a clue to her political commitment. In January 1859, she was included in the list of members who contributed with cash donations to the celebrations of Independence promoted by society (^{Correio Paulistano, 1859}).

Subsequent denunciations by houses and inspectors made against Benedita da Trindade and other women teachers, demanding the teaching of the domestic gifts, reinforce the interpretation that the regulation did not exclude the gifts and, consequently, the alignment between those in charge of the local inspection of public education and the rulings of the Imperial court. The character of the law is apprehended as a ‘field of struggles’, a negotiating arena (^{Thompson, 1987}).

^{Maria Lucia Hilsdorf (1997}) pointed out that the regulation that Benedita da Trindade relied on in her defense was subsequent to the fact that had generated the complaint. That is, it was known, through the requirements of the director of the Seminário de Educandas, that since 1829 (at least), the teacher stopped teaching sewing and the like. Considering this fact, ^{Hilsdorf (1997}) mocked that the teacher’s explanation ‘was irrelevant’, since she did not teach the gifts even before the regulation allowed the exclusion. It is even more ironic (and astute) to think that the teacher justified the absence by using a regulation that determined exactly the opposite.

Moving forward in the problematization of the absence of gifts, it is possible to interpret the legal ambiguity and the teacher’s responses as evidences of a literate resistance in the girls’ public classes of first letters of the Sé and of a possible tradition of the transmission of the gifts inside the domestic spaces. In a perspective in which laws are analyzed “[…] not only as a legal order, but also as language and social practice” (^{Faria Filho, 1998}, p. 92), with a view to highlighting the negotiations that cross them. ^{Edward Palmer Thompson (1998}, p. 86) emphasizes ‘custom’ as an “[…] interface of law with practice […]”, which can be regarded both as “[…] praxis [...] and also as law”. For the author, customs rest on “[…] two pillars - the use in common and the immemorial time” (^{Thompson, 1998}, p. 86). For Adriano Luiz Duarte,

What seems fundamental, in Thompson’s suggestions, is to perceive the relation between custom and law. And this relationship is always unstable and changeable. An example of this is given by the fact that registering customs, sometimes orally inherited, was a way of guaranteeing customary rights in the law. And, to ensure the maintenance of rights, custom could become very complex and sociologically sophisticated. That is to say, there was nothing static either in the custom nor in the law. Exactly so, the law does not appear as an instrument of domination of one class over another, but as an open and indefinite field of struggles, in which the complexity of customs plays a decisive role (²⁰¹⁰, p. 177).

Working with these reflections on ‘custom’ and ‘law’, it is possible to risk an interpretation for the thematic of the gifts in the 19^th century lands of São Paulo. The issue was not of domination of one class over another, but gender-based social relations that involved power, hierarchies and negotiations between subjects in the struggle for domains in different spaces. In this scenario of the young Empire of Brazil, one observes the dynamicity and the arena of conflicts between customs and law. The transmission of needle knowledge constituted the female experiences in the spaces of the house; weaving and sewing constituted the set of minimum knowledge for human survival, such as food, housing, and so on and its transmission was part of the family dynamics. When we observed the fires (homes) in the city of São Paulo, we identified many women who reported living from their seams (^{Dias, 1995}).

In the same period, the female public education was inaugurated in the different provinces. It is important to emphasize that before 1827, other experiences of instruction of the female population were experienced since the colony with private female and male teachers (paid or not) and preceptors. Official female schooling was too recent to rely on the pillar of ‘immemorial time’ (^{Thompson, 1998}) - and it was effected through a slow process of creation of chairs. However, boys’ public education already had a longer time in Brazil, with royal classes, and was in line with the tradition of the former metropolis, inserted among the western countries.

^{Guy Vincent, Bernard Lahire and Daniel Thin (2001}, p. 27) called the social process that made the form of hegemonic school socialization an “[…] invention of the modern school form”. This ‘form’ is understood as one of the interfaces of the new urban order that redefined civil and religious rights from the 17^th century onwards in Western countries. This form of socialization was accomplished through the constitution of specific spaces and the pedagogization of social relations of learning. There was a systematization of teaching with formalized book-based knowledge and the learning of specific forms of power. The authors point out the deep links that link school and written culture to a socio-historical whole. The emergence of modern states was accompanied by the organization of secular teaching systems and a continuous movement of homogenization of the various models of socialization and transmission of knowledge. In these official educational systems, in order to access any kind of school knowledge, it is necessary to master the written language (^{Vicent, Lahire & Thin, 2001}).

In this perspective, the absence of domestic gifts in the classes of teacher Benedita da Trindade can be read as an interface of this process of invention of the modern school form and of affirmation of the centrality of the writing-based knowledge in the schools, including in a girls’ class, standing out in relation to the gifts, which were already transmitted in domestic spaces.

In July 1838, the city council considered that ‘the teacher show[ed] zeal’ and that she adopted the catechism “[…] of Bishop Colbert, who in fact [was] one of the best” (^{Ofício da Câmara ao Presidente da Província, 1838}, p. 133). The opinion acknowledged the quality of Sé’s public girls’ class and ended by stating that the time of 4 hours, determined by law, was little for what was “[…] taught and therefore [was] unworkable the teaching of sewing” (^{Ofício da Câmara ao Presidente da Província, 1838}, p. 133). Thus, the justification for lack of time - quite feasible - was triggered by the teacher, and for some time considered legitimate by a portion of the rulers who inspected the public education.

However, a pressure movement so that the domestic gifts were included in the girls’ schools was being strengthened. In 1835, the inspection suggested a readjustment of the hours of the classes of the teacher Benedita to contemplate the teaching of these knowledge.

In the course of this Class it is impossible for the Teacher to fulfill the order of teaching gifts for domestic use: ‘I therefore think it necessary that you represent the Your Excellency President, so that he (if he finds it useful) will alter the course of her teaching, forcing her to teach in the morning to sew and embroider, and in the afternoon, to read and write with advantage for opposing objects, nor will the family fathers want to submit their daughters to such a light teaching as now happens’ [...] (^{Ofício de José Ignacio Silveira da Mota, 1835}, emphasis added).

The charge for teaching sewing and embroidery was accompanied by suggestions for redefinitions in the division of time between the different subjects. ^{Vincent et al. (2001}, p. 29) point out that the school socialization mode also accomplishes the “[…] schooling of social relations of learning [and is] inseparable from a scripturalization-codification of knowledge and practices”. Possibly, the gifts also underwent a process of codification to become feasible inside the schools. Margin for negotiation was reduced throughout the 1830s. Literate resistance provided even more space for the invention of a ‘gifted’ tradition in girls’ schools. In 1846, Provincial Law 34 determined that

Art. 2. The primary education for the female gender shall consist of the same subject matter as the preceding article, excluding geometry: and limited to arithmetic the theory and practice of the four operations; and also, of domestic gifts that serve the domestic economy (^{São Paulo, 1846}).

^{Leda Rodrigues (1962}) and ^{Maria Lucia Hilsdorf (1997}) agree on the interpretation that the pressure movement has been accentuated throughout the 19^th century. For Hilsdorf, the behavior of not teaching the gifts did not mean that teacher Benedita da Trindade “[…] violated a norm and reversed an image, [or that] she was ‘advanced for her time’ or even feminist” (^{Hilsdorf, 1997}, p. 99, emphasis added). But that there was a social change, from the beginning to the second half of the 19^th century, which came about through a pressure of society, through legislation and normalization, “[…] to make all women appear as the ‘angel of the home […]” with the imposition of ‘feminine work’ (^{Hilsdorf, 1997}, p. 99, author’s emphasis) to public girls’ classes through supervision, denunciations and admonitions to teachers.

Besides Benedita da Trindade, other female teachers stopped teaching the gifts and were reprimanded for it. The difference is that the other episodes are all after 1850. Box 2 lists the cases that involved issues related to the teaching of domestic gifts.

Source: ^{Munhoz (2018}, p. 39), ^{Rodrigues (1962}), ^{Hilsdorf (1997}), reports of presidents of the Province of São Paulo; reports of the Inspector of Public Instruction Diogo de Mendonça Pinto, offices from the City House of São Paulo and notes published in the periodicals of the Province of São Paulo.

Box 2: Notes on the absence of teaching domestic gifts in public girls’ classrooms. 

In September 1852, the general inspector informed the president that Professor Maria da Glória do Sacramento, from Bragança Paulista, was not qualified to receive her salary because she had not performed the duty of teaching domestic gifts. In Piracicaba⁵⁰, in 1856, the district inspector advised that general the inspector close the school of teacher Inácia Flora da Silva Santos, for “[…] being of no use, because the girls are not benefiting, especially because she does not provide education of needlework as it she obliged by law” (Relatório do Inspetor de Distrito José Joaquim Rodrigues Lopes, Sorocaba, 1856 apud ^{Rodrigues, 1962}, p. 84).

In the same perspective, there were cases of families that only demanded the teaching of sewing in the classes of first letters. In 1857, the female teacher of São Vicente informed the General Inspector that “[…] the parents of her girl students had proposed that she teach only sewing for her daughters, because reading and writing would do them no good and that, therefore, it was a nonsense spend time to learn this” (^{Ofício da Professora pública de primeiras letras, Mafalda Virgínia das Dores, 1857}).

^{Leda Rodrigues (1962}) and ^{Maria Lucia Hilsdorf (1997}) agree that such pressures led the General Inspector of Public Instruction to interfere in the 1850s by imposing that “[…] the examinations of the candidates for the position of public female teachers to include performance in needlework” (^{Hilsdorf, 1997}, p. 99). We agree with interpretation; we consider that the apex of this pressure movement was the inclusion of an evaluation in gifts in the examinations for admission in the feminine public teaching from 1854, when the general inspector of the Public Instruction, Diogo de Mendonça Pinto, triggered the resources available to ensure compliance of law. He devoted himself directly to the project and recorded in the 1854 report:

Source: Public Archive of the State of São Paulo, Digital Repository.

Figure 1: Excerpt from the General Report of the Public Instruction, SP, 1854, p. 14. 

The General Inspector’s request can be read as a strategic action by a man in a place of power (^{Certeau, 1994}), in order to ensure compliance with the law. The implementation of the examination in gifts, in the province of São Paulo, occurred in the same year in which the ‘Decree 1331-A, of February 17, 1854’ was promulgated in the Court, the reform Couto Ferraz, that determined, in article 19, that “[…] in examinations for female teachers, the examiners will hear the judgment of a public female teacher, or a lady appointed for this purpose by the Government, about the various needlework” (^{Brasil, 1854}, p. 45).

The temporal and content similarities between the decree of the Court and the provincial law indicate the circulation of laws and relations between the province of São Paulo, Court and other provinces, as well as their social representations in the different regions of the Empire. The Couto Ferraz decree, of February 1854, had an intense circulation throughout the country and probably influenced Diogo de Mendonça Pinto and other 19^th century characters of São Paulo, contributing to the strengthening of a culture that devotes a significant part of the girls’s school time to learning the domestic gifts (the general report of the São Paulo Public Instruction of 1854 was in December). ^{Heloísa Villela (2002}) and ^{Mattos (2004}) emphasize that the imperial state wanted the teacher to be an agent capable of reproducing a knowledge that preserved society as presented and did not subvert the social structure. The establishment of the examinations in gifts was one of the actions, concomitant to the intensification of the fiscalization, that favored the accomplishment of the needleworks in the feminine public classes and the relative maintenance of the hegemonic relations of gender. There were changes, but these were aligned to standards of conduct.

To perform the examinations on gifts, it was necessary the participation of a sapient person in the needleworks for the evaluation of the candidates. As it was a domain considered feminine, the chosen one for the accomplishment of these examinations was Anna Antonia Costa Guimarães - public professor of the chair of Santa Ifigênia from 1853, graduate at Seminário de Educandas. As a child, she entered as an orphan the Seminário in 1829 (the year following the creation), at approximately nine years of age. In 1839, director Maria Leocádia do Sacramento reported that Anna Antonia, aged 19, a native to Jundiaí and daughter of Francisco de Paula Ferreira, “[…] was able to read, write, count, sew, embroider, mark, to make nets and the most domestic uses” (^{Relação de educandas…, 1840}). The former student who became a public teacher continued to reside in the Seminário even after her appointment.

If the pressure for teaching gifts, begun in the second half of the 1830s, can be considered victorious with the requirement of the examinations for the beginners in teaching profession from 1854, the historical processes are crossed by negotiations and projects different from those that are have become hegemonic. On October 12, 1852, “[…] the teacher Benedita da Trindade had been able to dispense her disciples from manual labor, proving to be scarce time to teach reading and writing and suggesting that these gifts could be learned by the pupils in their own homes” (^{Rodrigues, 1962}, p. 83)⁵¹. Thus, even after two decades of denunciations and charges, in 1852 the General Inspector of Public Instruction exposed (and lamented) in the general report of the Public Instruction that the teacher of the Sé - the only chair in the capital until 1853 - still did not teach the domestic gifts:

Source: Public Archive of the State of São Paulo, Digital Repository.

Figure 2: Excerpt from the general report of the Public Instruction of Diogo de Mendonça Pinto, 1852, p. 9. 

The inspector insisted that the teacher’s ‘omission’ had been authorized by the government, according to the teacher’s own information. In the province’s main female public education chair, the almost total absence of domestic gifts is observed for more than 20 years, in spite of what was prescribed by legislation and successive charges. We located 14 lists of Benedita da Trindade students from the years 1832 to 1842 and from 1846 to 1848; in them, the teacher reported the progress of her pupils, and sewing was cited in only two years: 1839 and 1840, and even in these years it was mentioned only in the description of the state of knowledge of five girls (43 were enrolled in 1839 and 41 in 1840). It is possible that the families have requested the learning or that the teacher has registered knowledge that was not taught in the school. After 1840, there were other denunciations of absence of the gifts in the classes of the Sé.

Although the cases of charging and denunciations of the teachers in cases of absence of the teaching of the domestic gifts prevailed, there were situations in which the schools were cogitate to leave aside the sewing and to concentrate on the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic. In Santos, some families demonstrated to the government suggesting the exclusion of the subject. The newspaper ^{O Publicador Paulistano (1858}, p. 3) mentioned the case of “[…] some parents [who] send their daughters to school to learn only the first letters, giving them at home the teaching of domestic gifts […]”, requesting an opinion from the general inspector about the possibility of dispensing the teacher and her students in such circumstances. The response was not localized, but the application record evidences the coexistence of different perspectives of girls’ school education within the same society. Although in much smaller numbers, the experiences of female instruction without the gifts were a possibility in the province of São Paulo and it is fundamental to give visibility to these dissonant experiences. In history, non-hegemonic projects matter in the construction of narratives that seek to interpret how subjects dealt, negotiated, conformed and resisted in face of the constraints in which they lived. To regard them as historical experiences is to interpret the voices of subjects in their time and tradition as an arena of conflict, “[…] an arena of conflicting elements, which only under imperious pressure [...] takes the form of a ‘system’” (^{Thompson, 1998}, p. 16-17, author’s emphasis).

Between the 1830s and 1850s, the charge for teaching domestic gifts crossed the trajectory of teacher Benedita da Trindade and other teachers from São Paulo, with a more gifted tradition in women’s teaching profession, which, however, did not prevent dissonant experiences, such as class of Sé, in which the absence of the teaching of needleworks is observed.