The patriarchal oppression reserved a social, symbolic place for women, framed by segregation, devaluation of their work and social role. At the same time, this oppression developed surveillance and moral punishment practices aimed at the biological reproduction and to the reproduction of the conditions of everyday life. Social reproduction, is taught as a "women's thing." From the modern era of the Western world, detention houses and hospices or hospitals were created to “save” women from economic, mental or sexual conditions considered dangerous by local authorities or by the “heads” of their own family. The perplexity expressed by Mary Bosworth (2000) remains relevant: after decades, centuries, and with variations of national, criminal, political, and epochal scope, these prisons were shaped by norms of moralization built around "femininity", with surprising features of the historical permanence of inequality.
Strong socio-cultural markers to retain: the readers of the researched library were, to a large extent, women from popular classes, which is not frequent in Portuguese public libraries. As I could observe, very few of the women I interacted with had ever entered a library. Racialized women, mainly the romani and black, were quantitatively represented in numbers far higher than those estimated for these groups in Portugal at large
