RECEIVE AND CARE AFFECTIONATELY: THE EMÍLIA DE JESUS COSTA DAYCARE IN CHILD CARE IN AN INDUSTRIAL CONTEXT IN PORTUGAL AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Abstract

A balance of Portuguese literature reveals the conditions of poverty and unhealthiness in which a large part of the population lived at the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century, in a context of demographic growth, urban concentration, and industrialization in new organizational models. Among the social groups, the working class, among which were working women, faced several challenges to their survival, due to the vulnerability they experienced. Beneficence and charity, linked to religious practice and the salvation of the soul, being heirs of previous centuries, are still present in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the place of Devesas, in the parish of Santa Marinha, in the heart of Vila Nova de Gaia (North Portugal), Emilia de Jesus Costa, wife of a pottery industrialist in the area – António Almeida da Costa – the owner of the Industrial Complex of the Ceramic factory and Foundry das Devesas, decided to invest her inheritance in the construction of a day-care center in the care of childhood, seeking to respond to the needs of the labor force that was part of his industrial unit. Through the consultation of different sources of information, it was possible to reconstruct the dynamics of operation and day-to-day of the day-care center, as well as to trace the sociodemographic profile of children, human beings who have deserved less attention in Portuguese historiography.