Women in poverty: Intergenerational experiences

WOMEN IN POVERTY: intergenerational experiences

 Sarah Silva Telles

 The democratization of brazilian society has made great progress in the public sphere, since the end of the dictatorship, in 1985. In the meantime, there has been little progress in the democratization of the private relationships such as family and gender. Here, inequalities persist mostly for poor families with low levels of education. Sociological texts indicate that poor women bear the largest responsibility within the family: from domestic economy, childcare, to daily survival strategies.

The objective of this text is to understand and analyze the female generations in relation to male domination, marriage, sexuality and child care, in the context of poverty and violence (domestic and urban violence).

In one research in a favela de Rio de Janeiro, although a young woman interviewed had many more opportunities to develop a symmetrical relationship with her partner, the atmosphere of crime and material desire facilitated her to act as a property of her partner.

This context is a challenge for the present social relationship in modern institutions such as the family, and poses some questions that the text will try to answer: women of three generations, who live in a poor context, with low levels of education, and their enormous difficulty to escape of the fatality of poverty, and also of male domination.