Acta Scientiarum. Education

WOMEN IN EDUCATION, THE PRESS, AND PHOTOGRAPHY: SOURCES, ARCHIVES, AND FEMALE HISTORICAL HERITAGE

Abstract

According to the 2024 School Census of Basic Education, 2,367,777 teachers were registered working in public and private school systems throughout the country. Regarding the gender profile, the census highlights information that has changed little over recent decades: the profession is predominantly female, with around 79% women teachers. The National Institute for Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (Inep) corroborates these data on its website: “In 2024, 2.4 million teachers and 163,987 principals were recorded in basic education. Those who hold leadership positions, for the most part, have higher education degrees (91.5%) and are women (80.6%).” These statistics, however, do not correspond to the place occupied by women in research and in historical-educational heritage archives. Studies on women in education, drawing on different historiographical sources—such as the press, photography, and historical-cultural heritage—show that little research and production still exists on female protagonism, especially that of women teachers. In archival and museological collections, the proportion of collections and fonds related to men and women also reveals figures very close to those of the 2024 School Census. In the country’s heritage and archival institutions with the largest number of personal archives available for research, approximately 20% of these archives belong to women, and when women do appear, their visibility is often linked to a male archive. From this perspective, this Thematic Call Women in education, in the press and in photography: sources, archives and female historical heritage aims to make women visible, as well as their public representations—especially in newspapers of the period—which reveal much about the construction of femininity that has reached our own time. More specifically, we seek to show how women were protagonists in different projects, although later silenced and forgotten. Methodologically, this involves documentary research with the analysis of sources such as newspapers, magazines, egodocuments, notebooks, photographs, letters, books, among others. The theoretical framework encompasses authors whose writings provide support for questioning the sources, enabling them to respond to issues of historical meaning, ranging from specific content related to education to a detailed examination of the female condition exposed to the public in the periodical press.

Keywords: Women; Education; Periodical press; Archives; Women's heritage.

Período de submissão: 28/04//2026 a 30/07/2026.

 Previsão de Publicação: 3. Lote de 2027.