Motherhood and assistance: Religious formation of sons and daughters of Salesian Cooperators (Buenos Aires, 1900-1930)

Abstract

This paper focuses in the experience of mothers that have leader roles in salesian cooperative commissions between 1900 and 1930. The objective is to analize, based on journalist, administrative and letter sources, how they combine the maternity and the beneficence in the education and religious socialization of their children. It searches adding complexity to the characterization of the women interventions in the catholic movement, paying attention to the relations between the domestic and public spheres. Their participation as cooperators was intertwined with the family and home dimension of the religious education adding a public dimension to it. That imprint of the salesian cooperation about the motherhood rol was incremented when the commissions generated formal spaces oriented to children and youngs of their familiar and friendship relations in the decade of 1920.