Um tempo para Pandora brincar: etnografia acerca do tempo de lazer das operárias

The aim of this paper was to understand women s time as seen through the experiences of the women workers of Sobral-CE, who build free time and leisure time through the subjectivity of their histories as delineated by an everyday life as full of work as it is empty of leisure. The approach used here is an ethnographic one, through participative observation and narratives of working and leisure experiences. These workers everyday life reveals itself in the construction of their leisure time as related to their time of drudgery, in public as well as in private spaces. The responsibility of working away from home, as well as of carrying through domestic chores and of devoting themselves to their husband and their children was imposed upon women in a manipulative manner. This fact deprived women of their possibility of practicing and enjoying leisure activities. With the coming of the so called triple working day, women began organizing new strategies to elaborate, to organize, to create and to turn leisure activities possible. The interpretation of the trajectories of the lives of twenty women workers of a shoe plant in Sobral-CE was realized by the means of an ethnographic study. The thesis consists of the analysis of the construction of social times and of leisure practices, in a context interpenetrated by the cultural conditionings of much work and economic difficulties. The aim of the study was to understand how the women workers of Sobral-CE construct their practices and representations about free time and leisure in the web of sociabilities (possibilities, necessities, dilemmas and dreams). Everyday life is here defined as an ontological dimension of human life. Hence, it does not limit itself to the rituals, the celebrations or the exceptional conditions usually discussed by researchers