Women at university: presences and biographical experiences San Luis Potosí, México 1950-1970

Abstract

This article arises from a broader investigation that has the objective of recovering the educational trajectories of female university students who exercised their profession between the 1950s and 1970s; it also aims to recognize the experiences they had, when they were admitted to higher education at the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí (UASLP), Mexico. Access to education for women has been a discontinuous process in comparison to men’s; therefore, their participation in the educational and academic field has been overcome with difficulties and is looking for different paths. Currently retired and in the process of aging, the college students tell us their educational trajectory in a time of difficult female access to higher education, especially in careers traditionally considered as male education, in other words, medicine, chemical sciences, nursing and law. The methodology is focused on the biographical method, specifically on the stories of life that allow us to recover from the own voice of the university students the experiences in their educational and work trajectory in the decades of 1950s to 1970s, first, because they are female university students and later when exercising their profession in the academic fields and outside them.