This paper aims to present some issues emerged in an ongoing research about Women and innovation in teaching in Brazil and France (1860-1960). It focuses on the Brazilian context, exploring three major aspects. The first one addresses the relation between gender and education in Brazilian history of education. The second aspect is related to three particular questions: is there a glass ceiling that inhibits women to progress in the educational career, while an invisible escalator raises men to the top, as Christine Williams claims? Is the work of educational politician incompatible with the labor inside the classroom? Is there a feminine narrative or the narrative varies upon the subject registered? Sex and gender are combined when we analyze the different roles of educational career and the ways individuals write about their own experience in the profession.

Finally, the paper addresses some problems faced by the research such as challenges of sources and archives, and explores the case of Iracema Silveira, a primary school teacher that assumed the child library of Caetano de Campos School, from 1936 until 1966. Unmarried, she devoted herself to develop a pedagogy in which the library was the center of the school learning process, following the Active School principles. Stimulating the students’ initiative, she organized a school newspaper, sessions of telling stories, and contests of poems and short stories. Students acted as librarians helping colleagues to find books and information, as well as managing the collection. To register all these activities, she produced two photo albums and more than 6.000 volumes of the school journal were printed over 30 years.