Charity, seams and alms. An approach on survival strategies of poor working women in the city of Buenos Aires. 1852-1870

Abstract

This paper asks about the social experiences of poor and working women who lived in Buenos Aires between 1852 and 1870, and that at different times of their lives (indigence, old age, loss of rights, illness, widowhood, among others) demanded the obtaining of any help, benefit or right before authorities or benefactors. By focusing attention on these workers, who were presented as devoid of male guardians, it is possible to begin to recognize how their ways of life and work, involved notions of fairness, negotiations and reinterpretations of a world conjectured by authorities and masters In turn, by tracking their trajectories it is possible to give an account of their margins of action, thus rethinking the unique ways in which their historical agency was developed in a context where the foundations of female inferiority were legally laid.