Laura Fonseca

Sexualities, teenage pregnancy and educational life histories in Portugal: experiencing sexual citizenship?

This article focuses on Portuguese working-class teenage girls’ voices and experiences concerning sexuality and pregnancy. Within a sociological, feminist and educational framework, it explores the girls’ perspective on sexual and intimate citizenship as evidence of fairer forms of regulation of teenage sexualities. Through building life histories of three pregnant and teenage mothers, this article aims to understand how girls rehearse and live out their sexualities and pregnancies as well as listen to their voices and recognise their demand for inclusion and respect. Gender power relations emerge as central in configuring girls’ pathways and shed light on youth pregnancy.

Toward the Recognition of Their Educational Rights: Portugal

In Portugal the weight of women’s destiny as housewives and mothers was stronger than in other countries, according to Ana de Castro Osorio, a remarkable republican feminist of the early 1900s. She attributed what she considered to be a sad state of affairs to the atmosphere of “moral asphyxia” and the flawed nature of girls’ convent education that contributed to the “imprisonment” of women. For bourgeois and aristocratic girls, the domestic orientation of girls’ education, so harshly condemned by Osorio, prevailed from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century in home education, private institutions, and state schooling. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, feminist voices began calling for changes in girls’ education, citing, in particular, examples from Switzerland, Germany, and especially America.2 Nonetheless, more egalitarian opportunities for girls in secondary education only developed in the second half of the twentieth century and primarily after the 1970s.

Cidadania, educação e responsabilidade social: percursos biográficos de jovens grávidas em contextos de protecção social = Citizenship, education and social responsibility: the biographical journey of young pregnant women in social protection environments

Sexuality and early pregnancy and childbirth are much debated in the current globalized modernity. Since these complex subjects involve rights, regulation and public social control issues, they are quite relevant in education. Based on the stories of a 17 years old Portuguese and a 19 years old Romanian young women, this paper reveals knowledge. Due to their early pregnancy and motherhood, both live in social protection institutions. The text interprets their speech and subjectivity regarding their experiences before and during guardianship, as well as their projects for the future. The discussion is framed by the relations between the intimate, sexual citizenship and education of each girl. It highlights the social regularities that mark out their lives and that of their child. It also addresses manifestations and regularities related to both gender and power such as: school dropout before pregnancy, unprepared sexuality and dificulties to negotiate safe sex

Cidadania, educação e responsabilidade social: percursos biográficos de jovens grávidas em contextos de protecção social

Nowadays, sexuality, youth pregnancy and parenthood are subjects of great complexity and are relevant for education, in the global modernity debate, concerning rights, regulation and public social control issues. This paper focuses girls’ biographical narratives, with seventeen to nineteen years old, living in social protection institutions due to youth pregnancy and maternity. Therefore, their perspectives produced inside the institutions reveal their subjectivities and paths lived before and during the custody experience. The argument establishes the relations between (sexual) citizenship and education, based on each singular path and its social relationships. There are obvious manifestations that relate gender and power, such as: the disconnection prior school; sexualities unprepared, the difficulty in negotiating safe sex.