Chapter 4: “Moving Portraits” of Femininity: A Study of the Bilheiras of Piauí

This chapter is about women as housekeepers. It departs from a series of researches since 1990 focusing housing, families, and children where housekeepers were usually women and the house arrangements were mainly their responsibility.

From the word decoration we can find many enclosed meanings:

However, to cope for this subject as a psychologist––not as an architect or a decorator or a designer––a new concept is necessary. This concept is ornamental.

The professor of Medieval Art at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris VI, Jean-Claude Bonne¹ defines ornamental as a universal esthetical–anthropological category by which human beings are in a continuous movement toward humanization. It’s a dimension that implicates esthetics and anthropomorphism defined as the continuous attribution of humanity to human beings.