Biography and Access to the City: The Working-Class Women Struggle for Housing in Brazil

The housing policy in Brazil was never stable, frequently shifting from more centralized to more decentralized governmental actions. It was not before the 1940’s that, as part of the national-developmental strategy - in a framework of intense urbanization and industrialization - that Brazilian’s government assumed housing to be a matter of social welfare. If the segmentation in the access to adequate housing was relevant as pertaining to the class realm, one can say that a second segmentation would be the gendered differences in the access to durable goods: the history of urbanization in Brazil and land distribution from colonial time to the present cannot be easily separated from the processes of social - symbolic and material - inclusion and exclusion of women. By biographically interviewing women engaged in urban housing social movements, I aim the access to the historical and biographical sense of the development of housing stratification from the perspective of the embodied actions and narratives. In this sense, the main objective of this investigation is to make sense of the problem of women and housing from the perspective of the actors - women engaged in social urban housing movements - trying to understand what are the symbolic and material experiences, changes and continuities experienced by women throughout life that can help us understand the class and gender segregation in urban spaces and in the access to adequate housing.