Literacy training for women is an important social issue that reaches beyond formal and instrumental education, since the commitment to such a process requires a plan to transformand re-appropriate one’s life. To understand this project, we wished to understand the life paths and the singular and social actions of the research participants, who discovered their own ways of appropriating their world. Using life stories as a research methodology allows us to see the relationships the women have with their social worlds, relationships shaped by the fact that they are women. This article focuses on these women’s childhood stories in order to better understand their life experiences, their educational history and their socio-historical reality, thus increasing our understanding of the phenomenon.