Marie-Thérèse Lévêque and the Lisbon Social Work Institute (1935-1944): a discreet pioneer

In Portugal, the teaching of social work began in 1935 with the opening of the Lisbon Social Work Institute, whose technical direction was taken until 1944 by a French social worker: Marie-Thérèse Lévêque.In the present scenery of Portuguese social research, the knowledge produced about the Lisbon Social Work Institute is placed at a generic and patchy level, and although there are no specific studies about the construction of teaching in that school, many authors insist on the influence of French currents of social thought and action, for instance, as a result of the employment of French professionals and directors, as is the case of Marie-Thérèse Lévêque. Knowing the Portuguese social reality of the 1930´s, this permeability is not surprising, taking into account the social and cultural similarities of Latin reality, which stand out the small and medium industries, the Catholicism, and a personalistic view that more easily harmonized with the existing possibilities during this historical period. About the figure of Marie-Thérèse Lévêque, seventy-five years have passed after her arrival to Portugal, in 1935, and there are only a limited set of references concerning this first technical director of the school that started the teaching of social work in Portuguese territory. Unlike what happens with some social work pioneers her contemporaries, she never had her own biographer.