Education and the female condition in a treatise by Alexandre de Gusmão written in the Portuguese America in the late 17th century

Abstract

In this paper we present an analysis of the discourses about education and the female condition present in the work Arte de crear bem os filhos na Idade da Puericia [Art of raising children well at the age of childhood]. Written in the Portuguese America, but initially published in Portugal in 1685, the work by the Jesuit priest Alexandre de Gusmão (1629-1724) assigned its last chapter, “Of the special care that must be taken in raising girls”, to address the warnings necessary for the good upbringing of girls. In the context of production of the educational work proposed by Alexandre de Gusmão, we want to propose the analysis of a set of statements that put in evidence a kind of ordering of the living conditions and educational guidelines of female children. We infer that the propagation of works of a moralist nature in the Luso-Brazilian space between the 17th and 18th centuries enabled the circulation of such enunciative orders, significantly influencing the social behavior of the time. From a historical and philosophical perspective, mainly through Foucauldian theoretical references, we understand that the work was an efficient mechanism that acted in the discursive constitution on specific models of education to guarantee the production of a certain type of female child subject. Notably, we identified two regulations that warned about the good upbringing of Christian girls through the practices of guardianship and retreat.