Technification and gender in the labor force of the Brazilian Legion of Assistance: Social assistance and modernity (1945-1964)

The Brazilian Legion of Assistance (LBA, in the Brazilian acronym), an institution dedicated to maternity and childhood support, founded in 1942 by First Lady Darcy Vargas, has always relied on the work of women as volunteers, even though the institution underwent significant transformations throughout its existence. Using as historical source the edition of the “Bulletin of the Brazilian Legion of Assistance”, an official publication of the institution, this article sought to analyze the structure of LBA’s labor force and to elucidate the work of women in the institution, considering that charity and philanthropy were historically related to the feminine. In order to investigate to what extent these labor relations were permeated by gender representations, we largely employed the concept of gender. The analysis covers the years 1945 to 1964, a period of effervescent discourse on modernity and the rationalization of everyday life. In this way, we also sought to analyze the reflections that LBA promoted about social service as a technical field, highlighting the dichotomy between philanthropic work and a rationalized and technified social service. The purpose of this study was to analyze the technical and scientific professions that made up the LBA’s labor forces and to confront them with the concept of gender in order to reveal, in the context of LBA’s work, ambivalent relations and reflections between a technified social service called modern and a philanthropic one. We observed, however, that this was a turning point in the institutional history of LBA and the history of assistance in Brazil, and that women, numerically superior in the workforce, were more restricted to certain positions, due to consolidated conceptions of gender for the period.