Women autonomy and social policy: Community, religion and new welfare programs at São Paulo, Brazil

In Brazil, welfare system has recently been organized to permit its universal and continuous access, breaking the tradition of offering punctual services. In addition, systematic cash transfer programs have been implemented as one of the principal instrument to fight against extreme poverty. The consolidation of social policy in the country has led to a massive entrance of the poor in the category of welfare recipients, especially women. They are effectively target of Brazilian new welfare services witch are essentially family based, what in general rely on women's disposition to care for family. Thus, rather than being recognized as an independent moral agent, poor women are viewed as strong ally of the state, so that social programs can be successful. This mean to provide women with normative action-guiding principles which are often translated as "helping their autonomy". The purpose of this paper is to analyze, in a local level, how those familist/normative new welfare programs have penetrated in poor women's everyday life and how they articulate them with their traditional sociability like community relationships and religious (especially neo-Pentecostal) practices. Ultimately, the study ought to reveal, from the standpoint of feminist ethics, the conflict between those programs and other strategies used by women to pursue autonomy. We take as case study clients of social assistance and health care programs living on the outskirts of the municipality of São Paulo that we have researched over two years, based on ethnography and analysis of life history.