Social patterns of literacy in the city of Porto at the end of the nineteenth century

Abstract

The aim of the present work is to develop a reconceptualisation of the social and cultural influences on literacy based on the case study of the population of Porto at the end of the nineteenth century. Usually literacy means a positive fact in the vital need for the modernisation of contemporary societies (economic growth, industrialisation, wealth, productivity, political stability and urbanidation), which was not the configuration of Portuguese social structure (25.5% literacy rate in 1900) or Porto’s social structure (52.5% literacy rate in 1900). The possible expansion of industry or the very developed trade and bank sectors in the city of Porto were an “island” of modernity among the strong sociocultural characteristics of rurality and the predominance of primary production in the economic structure of Portugal. At first sight, it would be easy to design the literacy profile of Portuguese society if we took into account only the cold figures of the official statistics. The results presented are based on the categorisation of the signatures of the people who took part in 1198 marriage ceremonies certified in the city of Porto in the year 1890. In an epoch where there were multiple signature styles and at the same time attempts to standardise handwriting, the newly‐weds’ signatures on the marriage record became a privileged and reliable indicator of the social profile of writing skills usage as well as an indicator of literacy levels, connected with the handwriting and orthographic characteristics evident in the signatures. The relevance of this option resides in the path to endow our analysis with patterns of coherence, comparability and graduation and in the understanding and critical interpretation of the results. The social analysis of Porto shows literacy rates shaped by the strong influence and regulation of factors such as gender, place of birth, emigration and professional occupation inasmuch as it interacts with social structures and the process of social inequality. Incidentally, it will be among women that we can find empirically the consubstantiation of common‐sense perceptions concerning the obstacles to literacy, namely the low attendance and the early dropout of primary schooling, the distinct gap between the literacy levels of the younger and adult generations, the entropic effects that the female rural exodus provoked in the literacy rates of the city, the strong correlation between the literacy rates and the socio‐occupational hierarchy and the cheapness of women’s non‐qualified work. Among the men, we register specific behaviours, namely the quite homogeneous literacy rates between age cohorts, the positive effects of the rural exodus on the distribution of literacy skills in the city and the resistance to the transformation of craftwork into proletarian jobs which is deeply connected with the maintenance of important literacy rates by the workers of traditional crafts.