Defendamos, na criança, a geração de amanhã: o patronato de menores abandonados, assistência e educação à infância no Rio de Janeiro na década de 1910

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the process of implementation/consolidation of the Patronage of Abandoned Minors in Rio de Janeiro, highlighting the assistance and protection actions under taken by the institution in favor of poor and abandoned children throughout the 1910s. Created in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1908, the Children’s Patronage was conceived on the initiative of philanthropists involved in the cause of childhood as a private charity institution, initially maintained through donations and later receiving subsidies from the Public Power. The periodization proposed for the research is justified, considering that the establishment and consolidation of the institution took place during the 1910s. With this study, we seek to understand the networks of sociability conceived by the men and women of the Rio elite involved with the creation and functioning of the institution. In its first years of activity, the Patronato was constituted as a day care center for children up to three years old, expanding its assistance to minors of all ages from the year 1915, when it started to administer the Asilo de Menores – a public institution maintained by police authorities in the country's capital. In order to welcome, protect and regenerate through discipline and work, the Patronage assumed the purpose of assisting poor and abandoned minors of both sexes, initially in the Federal capital, but, over the years, it incorporated establishments of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Through documentary sources consisting of newspapers, magazines, reports and books, we sought to understand the debates surrounding the creation of the institution and its operation, as well as the “tactics” and “strategies” in the process of implantation and consolidation of the institution in its first years of operation. In the construction of this research, some authors were decisive for the understanding of documental sources, among them Ginzburg (1989; 2007), Bloch (2001), Goffman (2003), Prost (2012), Sirinelli (2016), Velho (1986;1987), Certeau (1982; 1998); others were relevant to understanding the historical context, as Rizzini Irma; Rizzini Irene (2004), Rizzini (1990; 2012), Kuhlmann Junior (1991), Araujo (1993), Marcílio (1998), Chalhoub (2004), Camara (2004; 2010; 2014; 2017), Sanglard; Ferreira (2010; 2014), Sanglard (2014),Gondra (2000).