The supposedly subaltern professions: the example of Brazilian nursing

Abstract

This is a study about women as health educators and public health nurses in the first half of the 20th century in Brazil. Historical sociology, as a methodological and theoretical tool, will guide our analysis of the relations among institutions, professional power, and identities, highlighting the ways through which women professionals were capable of creating their own territory of autonomous action. In Brazil, the configuration of the public health field in the early 1920s was intimately associated with nation-building processes, and demanded new professionals for traditionally female occupations. The training of the young candidates took place at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, in Rio de Janeiro, at São Paulo's Institute of Hygiene, at Medical Schools, in foreign centers such as the Teachers College and the Toronto School of Nursing, as well as by means of on-the-job training. The sociological literature has stressed the (basically male) medical dominance, to the detriment of a focus on the new emerging professions. This trend has been clear in Brazil, and it is time that the "sociological gaze" took a close interest in the unique role played by women as health educators and visiting nurses, based in community health centers as early as 1925 in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and other centers, and in rural health units across the nation. Health education was the key element in this new scenario of campaigns against endemic diseases a national practice which Brazilians called "campanhismo" - that stressed non-authoritarian means in place of old schemes of medical policy.