The study approached the history of women who live in the central region of Santos to understand their life condition, their strategies to survive and their representations of the female role and of the construction of their identity as women. Nine women were interviewed in the places where they lived to get the most significant elements of their trajectory through their oral histories. Such histories showed processes of ruptures and continuities, as well as the fragility of the population under the effect of vulnerability and exclusion processes, and they disclosed the female condition of women in situation of social vulnerability.
Female condition; Family-head women; Social vulnerability