“The children of Eve”: poor children and teenagers in the shadow of delinquency and abandonment in Florianópolis – 1900-1940 This book analyzes the discourses of intellectuals, jurists, and public authorities about poor children and teenagers in Florianópolis in the first four decades of the twentieth century. In the country’s pedagogical knowledge in that century, childhood had a “natural plasticity”, therefore susceptible to molding. Thus, shaping the child and adjusting it to the ideals of a “civilized” society became the pivot of passionate discourses in State Chambers and Federal Congress, as well as in the intellectual environment. In those, poor children and adolescents became synonyms of “abandoned” and/or “perverted. The discourses ranged from defending those children and adolescents, to protecting society against them, since they also “represented” a threat to the nation’s “order and progress”. When analyzing the experiences of those children we penetrate in a world of the “pitiful” and the “dangerous”, as well as in a network of intrigues. In it not only the “minors” were subject to a project of exclusion under the aegis of differentiated inclusion, but everyone that represents “the other”, the one that does not fit the normative system which, in that moment, was regarded as “universal and absolute”.