A Creative Life: Carolina Florence
Carolina Florence, Hercules’s second wife, founder and creator of Florence College, dedicated to educating women, was born 194 years ago. In a reflection written especially for the IHF, Cecilia Prada discusses the issue of women’s education in the nineteenth century.
Por Cecilia Prada*
Born in Cassel, Germany, on March 21, 1828, Carolina Krug belonged to a cultured middle-class family. Her father, Johann Heinrich Krug, was a renowned artisan and the owner of a factory for wooden mosaics used in the floors of palaces and castles. The whole family was involved in cultural affairs, and all the children, boys and girls, were given the same basic education that later allowed them to excel in their various chosen professions. This tendency to the “normalization” of the feminine education was characteristic of Europe, especially in Germany, already during Carolina’s childhood – contrary to what happened in younger countries, such as Brazil. Only a century later, in 1960, with the Law of Lines of Direction and Bases of the Education, were the existing differential rules for both sexes “normalized”. An inheritance that was left to us by private religious education, instituted and almost mandatory in the country since 1859, especially for women, and that under different aspects, we can say, persists.
Carolina soon showed extraordinary intellectual capacity and a marked interest in Literature and Universal History. She was determined in her professional choice, and decided to devote herself entirely to teaching. She was encouraged by her parents, who authorized her to undertake, by herself, a long and arduous trip, partly by stagecoach and partly by train, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. There she enrolled in the La Servette Institute, directed by Madame Niederer, who was the wife of an old friend and collaborator of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), considered to be the precursor of modern pedagogy, which would be fully developed only in the beginning of the twentieth century, with the New School.
Until she was 24, Carolina had a wide range of professional possibilities, both in her home town and in other cities. In Altona, a Swiss city, she worked as a teacher at the Biernatriski Institute for three years and was even offered the directorship of the institution. She did not accept, though, because, being very attached to her family (her parents and four siblings), she decided to join them when in 1852, due to the fierce political persecution suffered by her father for being a liberal, they all decided to immigrate to Brazil. The oldest son, Jorge Krug, had already immigrated on his own in 1846 and settled in Campinas as a pharmacist. He had amassed a reasonable fortune and enjoyed an excellent reputation in the national social and political life – he was a Freemason (degree 33) and for a long time held the office of Vice Consul of Switzerland for the entire Province of São Paulo.
Two years after her arrival in Campinas, Carolina married the widower Hercule Florence - the approach came through her brother Jorge, who had become friends with the inventor and artist. Hercules’s first marriage had ended tragically: his first wife Maria Angélica de Vasconcellos had 13 children in 20 years, and died at the age of 36 as a result of giving birth to the thirteenth, who also died. The bequest of eight living children – the youngest aged 7 and the oldest 23 – was placed under the charge of the stepmother, who were welcomed and raised with great love. From her marriage with Hercule Florence, he would add to that group, seven more children.
Theirs was a mature and harmonious union, for, as Carolina’s biographer Arilda Ines Miranda Ribeiro says, “it came from a bond of respect and companionship, rather than one of one sex subjugating the other, which usually occurred during the Brazilian Empire. For almost nine years, the large family had to live privately in a farm, named Soledade, located near the town of Laranjal, which had been purchased with the inheritance that Hercule’s children received from their mother. Hercule and Carolina, both of whom had high tradition and intellectual aspirations, were forced to face the economic reality: they became farmers, rapidly switching, as was the case with other farmers in the area, from the production of sugar to coffee.
They worked on this with great focus and obtained excellent economic results. However, Carolina was always leading the family, overseeing what the children’s needs were, as they grew up. Therefore, in 1863, she decided to move back to Campinas, so they could study. In addition, because with the development of the coffee plantations, farmers needed to have business connections with exporters and associations, and that depended on a stable social and political network to place their products.
Then is when Carolina emerged from the traditional role of mother-wife in which she had been immersed, to resume an old aspiration: the foundation, in Brazil, of an educational establishment that would be similar to the “advanced” one from which she had graduated in Switzerland. Hers would be exclusively devoted to female education. With the assistance of her husband and her brother Jorge, she founded the Colégio Florence on November 3, 1863.
It was the best possible initiative, both culturally and financially, because that was a product – an establishment dedicated to the instruction and education of women – that never existed in Brazil from the country’s foundation until the middle of the nineteenth century. Numerous foreign travelers who toured the Brazilian interior during the colonial period and at the time of the First Empire described the backwardness and ignorance of women, even the ones that belonged to wealthy families. They were kept in a regime similar to that of the Arabian hinterland, illiterate. Literacy would be of no use to them – “would it be to write to boyfriends?” – since they were dedicated to the sole task at hand, which was bearing and rearing of a mass of citizens, preferably males, for the progress of the country and the glory of the Holy Catholic Church.
However, with the slow transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, our patriarchs began to feel the difference in the degree of civilization that existed among elegant European women compared to their “caipirôa” [unpolished] ones, who could contribute nothing to the social prestige of the family. In the most sophisticated academic and political circles, from the end of the eighteenth century, there was a real clamor for the “education of women”. However, one should emphasize, it would never be an education equal to that of men. Our patrician women had to be groomed to be pleasant, sophisticated “angels of the home,” literate, polished, well mannered. They should speak French, obviously, play the piano, be skilled at most in beautiful embroidery, in copying paintings, in reciting romantic verses, and especially in dealing with slaves, later with domestic servants. Hence, the atmosphere would become more pleasant for their consorts and they would rather spend more time at home than in the luxurious brothels that, at that time, began to spread throughout the country.
Even though Hercule recognized the intellectual capacity and education of his Carolina, he also shared this idea of a cultural limitedness in women. As he said in an 1854 letter to his mother, praising his wife: “...I have been absorbed by her qualities, her talent and her distinguished manners. Having acquired her education for three years at an Institute for young women in Geneva, she has a perfect knowledge of French. She knows history, geography, elementary mathematics, painting and music. All the occupations of her sex.”
From the mid-nineteenth century on, people started to think about the need for women’s professionalization. However, in all social classes – not only among the oligarchy and the intellectuality tied to it, who clung to conservative traditions – there was also a strong clamor against the possibility of cultural parity between men and women. In 1851, the Baron of Rio Branco wrote in the newspapers that the disastrous attempts by foreign feminist groups should not be revived in the country, because female education “should only consist of domestic chores and other disciplines that could form gifted ladies and good housewives”. He also warned that granting political rights to women could not be accepted: “.... God forbid that women should be affected by this leprosy. Where would we end up with this republic of publicists in skirts? Who would resist the seduction of these women”?
Only to cite one more example among hundreds, we can remember what José Veríssimo, a writer and prestigious literary critic, said in his book A educação nacional [The national education]. He accepted and even recommended female education, so that women could be good mothers, but he reminded, “since women are less intelligent than men, they should not receive instruction in mathematics and other scientific subjects.”
To fill the gap, French nuns from the Congregation of Saint Joseph of Chamberry were imported in 1859, and they founded in Itu, São Paulo State, the Colégio Nossa Senhora do Patrocínio – a prototype of the religious boarding schools of various orders that spread throughout the country with one main purpose in mind. Those schools would be seedbeds of Christian girls, cultivated as pure and religious to supply fresh merchandise for the moment when boys of good families would at last be resigned to marrying girls of their class to form families and to solidify as men of “morals and society”. All this after they had enjoyed their youth and abundantly proved their manhood in the luxury cabarets and brothels where they were taken by their own parents and masters, under the distracted and complicit eye of the authorities and of the Holy Mother Church itself – at a time of staunch Roman ultramontanism.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the city of Campinas became an important commercial, political and cultural center. The daily newspapers discussed issues related to the republican system, abolitionism, secular education, mixed education and freethinking. Before the foundation of Colégio Florence, other small institutions had tried, with no success, to impose new directions for women’s education. Nationwide, there was at least one major failure in this regard: in 1834, the first Brazilian feminist, the Pernambucanian Nísia Floresta, tried unsuccessfully to run the Colégio Augusto in Rio de Janeiro, which was a school for girls that replaced embroidery and prayer with scientific curricula, language and literature. She was harshly persecuted and decided to leave the country forever. She went to France, where she settled, always producing, working, writing and publishing several books. There she became friends with personalities such as Chateaubriand and Augusto Comte. In São Paulo City, a well-known and lamented debacle was that of the secular school founded in 1876 by Rangel Pestana and his wife, who were harassed by the population.
The Colégio Florence, in Campinas, was better able to face adverse circumstances and resist the conservative sectors. It had the support of the Freemasons and the Krug and Florence families, as well as other local personalities. Its cornerstone, however, was Carolina Florence’s total dedication and professional competence. From that moment on, the couple adapted to a way of life quite different from that of previous periods. Carolina took on her full duties as a teacher and a principal, personally choosing, after strict scrutiny, the school’s teaching staff. To this end, she traveled several times to Europe to hire German, French, and English teachers. She was equally committed to the choice of the student body. Her school had few girls, always from the upper class, who were conscientiously willing to study, to have a profession; in short, the institution was focused from the beginning on revaluing the woman as a person, based on what had been established, much earlier, by Master Pestalozzi. He did not see the school as a place where cultural information is passed on to the students, but rather as a privileged place for individual formation, founded on affection between students and teachers, on the establishment of permanent bonds that would lead them, together, to the search for knowledge and the practice of good deeds. This knowledge would not be grounded on abstractions and ideologies, but on important facts and experience.
Despite being a Christian (of Presbyterian denomination), and of cultivating religious feelings, Carolina never imposed in her school classes any compulsory teaching or practice of rituals of any kind. She never let religious precepts supplant the values of secular morality, the ones left by the European Enlightenment movements, which, above all, valued freedom of expression. Master Pestalozzi, an inspiration for the Florences, gathered around him, in the school he maintained in Yverdon for twenty years, a group of outstanding intellectuals, among them Talleyrand, Madame de Staël, Allan Kardec, Froebel. In the same way, the Carolina and Hercule always remained connected with the most prominent personalities in the field of literature, and arts, and education, such as João Kopke, Rangel Pestana, and Julio Ribeiro, who taught there or regularly delivered conferences at Colégio Florence.
During Carolina’s trips, Hercule replaced her as the school’s director, organizing the courses, teaching drawing, and taking care of the finances. Unlike his first marriage, in which he let himself live, simply not caring much about what others wanted or did, in his second union he cherished his wife, was concerned by her “too much work”, felt compelled to help her, devoted himself more to his coffee transactions, so that she would have more money for her institution. Yet, as his biographers have pointed out, this period of his life was characterized by a retraction of his creativity, both in the field of sciences and in the arts. He suffered some degree of depression, and soon fell ill, creating nothing more until his death.
They both remain, like the memory of his first wife, Maria Angélica, in the true worship maintained by all their descendants, from both the Krug and the Álvares Machado sides, who are numerous and live all over Brazil. It is a plethora of industrious citizens, distinguished in various fields as excellent professionals, promoters of the arts and engaged in philanthropic activities.
The Colégio Florence succeeded for twenty-five uninterrupted years in Campinas, from 1863 until the beginning of 1889, when, due to the sudden outbreak of an epidemic of yellow fever, it had to be closed and transferred to the neighboring city of Jundiaí. There it functioned until 1928, being then incorporated into the Normal School of that city. In 1946, it was passed on to the government of São Paulo State and became a middle school and a teacher-training institution. In 1957, the descendants of the Florence family opened the Instituto de Educação Florence in the city of São Paulo, which operated until mid-1980s, a record in the historical annals of all the stages of the uniquely institution originated in Campinas that contributed to improve the level of education of Brazilian women.
* Cecilia Prada (Bragança Paulista, São Paulo, 1929) is a journalist, a fiction writer, a dramatist, a translator, and a theater and literature critic. She graduated in Neolatin Letters at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie in 1951. In that same year, she finished her degree in Journalism at Faculdade Cásper Líbero.
