Lives of peasant and worker women and stories of documents in the South Central Sertão of Pernambuco

Abstract

The article focuses on how peasant and worker women deal with norms and rules about birth, ageing and death, in the process of getting access to social rights, especially to Social Security. The aim is to analyze difficulties and strategies used by women in order to comply with the legal demands of proof of work experience in family farming by way of civil and professional documents. Research was undertaken in the municipalities of Santa Cruz da Baixa Verde and Triunfo, in the Pernambuco Sertão in Northeast Brazil. The absence of documents reveals how parameters of modernity are installed in the nation, understanding them as necessarily related to gender, class, race, ethnicity and geopolitical criteria. Copyright © 2006 by Revista Estudos Feministas.