This text’s objective is to analyze the construction of women workers’ experiences in the São Paulo auto-parts industry by examining their life stories. The analysis of how working women think and view their life circumstances and their work is based upon their descriptions of work in the factory, of their life and professional trajectories: domestic and wage labor, family practices and their careers, work and family relations, migration and future plans. This text’s unifying thread is an examination of the formation of working women’s collective experience and of the images resulting from that experience. In conclusion, it seeks to establish a relationship between those experiences and the idea of destiny, as well as between the practices developed in daily life and the images women workers have of themselves, of their lives, and of women in general.
Working women: experiences and images; life histories