Laura Jacobina Lacombe

The participation of women in society organization gained new contours in republican Brazil, period in which they legitimately gained greater circulation in public space. Many combined their service to the Homeland and to God in their strategies for affirmation in intellectual, social, cultural and educational fields. This was the case of Laura Jacobina Lacombe, prominent Catholic intellectual from Rio de Janeiro who worked tirelessly in the educational field between the 1920s and 1980s. The focus of this text is on Laura's work as an intellectual who built her life around two major projects: women's education and Catholic militancy. The aim is to think about the participation of women in the history of education as intellectuals and analyze what they undertook based on the spaces they occupied. In dialogue with Sirinelli (1996), Gisèle Sapiro (2012) and Michelle Perrot (1998), thinking about what it means to be a female intellectual implies considering how women constitute themselves as subjects in this field. Methodologically, I analyze Laura's engagement in educational issues, based on the periodical press and her three main books - Moral cristã e Educação, A Escola e Vida and Como nasceu o colégio Jacobina - sources that leave clues to her constitution as intellectual and to her pedagogical thinking. Between discourses and practices, women like Laura Jacobina Lacombe, who achieved prominence in the educational field, were guiding a way of doing the feminine condition, bringing out a set of lessons, between the said and the unsaid, that guided women of different generations.