[1] She then helped found the cultural magazine Clima, alongside her future husband Antonio Candido and other young intellectuals of the era.
[1][2][3] In 1952, she received a doctorate in social sciences, with a thesis on 19th-century fashion, and in 1954 she became the founding director of the teaching of aesthetics at USP's Philosophy Department.
[1] She married the critic and sociologist Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza in 1943, and the couple had three children.
[1][2] Gilda de Melo e Souza died in 2005, at age 86, at São Paulo's Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital.
[1][2] In 2014, professor Walnice Nogueira Galvão published A palavra afiada, a collection of some of de Melo e Sousa's interviews, letters, and writings.