Brazil's history of slavery has had a profound impact on domestic workers’ theoretical and historiographical place in the country's field of labor studies. From the beginning of colonial rule until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, enslaved men and women, natives and Africans, were the main source of labor, both in rural areas—on the large plantations devoted to export goods as well as the small farms producing crops for the internal market—and in cities. The centrality of captive labor to Brazilian society has led to the general acceptance of a simplified image of a country divided between indolent masters and their toiling slaves.Footnote 1 Nowhere does this image fall shorter of the complex historical reality than in the domestic sphere, often considered as a simple extension of the dynamics of slave relations in society as a whole. In examining the lives and struggles of domestic workers, this article argues that despite the widespread presence of slaves, paying attention to the social dynamics and tensions that arose in urban households between free domestic workers and their employers can shed new light on the experience of the laboring poor—especially women—in Brazil. In doing so, this article contributes to an ongoing effort among scholars and activists to recognize domestic work as an important component of the historical narrative of labor relations in Brazil.
Domestic work was certainly intertwined with Brazilian society's experiences of enslavement and tainted by the expectations formed by dependent relationships, demands for obedience, domination, and the harsh exploitation of a slave labor regime, but it was also a distinct form of work and social relations. This article argues that we should consider free domestic labor on its own terms. Paying close attention to the lives of domestic workers, and particularly women involved in domestic work, whether paid or unpaid, can illuminate the broader social and economic world inhabited by the laboring poor, as well as the many conflicts that stirred the liminal space between the domestic and the public spheres in nineteenth-century Brazil.
The article discusses a set of cases from different parts of southeastern Brazil that came before the courts of appeal in the capital city of Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 2 These cases involved legally free women litigating for the remuneration of their services as domestic workers from the early 1830s to the late 1880s. The new nation's first constitution, passed in 1824, created the institutions of a monarchical government and combined the aspirations to liberal models of Western modernity with a society and economy deeply rooted in and dependent on slavery. Intense legislative activity characterized the first decades after independence: from the Criminal Code (1830) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (1832),Footnote 3 to the first laws against the Atlantic slave trade (1831), and laws to regulate the labor contracts made by free national and foreign workers (1830 and 1837). These laws, as well as the Phillippine Ordinances that governed colonial and nineteenth-century Brazil, formed a complex, multilayered, and ambivalent body of labor regulations. By discussing the legal framework and analyzing the arguments put forth by women who sued for their wages, I illustrate how the contested definitions and limits of “work” and “intimacy” played a fundamental role in the arguments made by both domestic workers and those whom they challenged in court. Finally, I will consider the place occupied by “free” domestic work in a slave society, relating it to the changing legal and social context of nineteenth-century Brazil.
The Domestic Labor Archive
The everyday lives of free domestic workers in nineteenth-century Brazil left few traces behind. There certainly exists less documentation about them than enslaved men and women, who aroused far more anxiety in a society deeply dependent on their labor. The free working poor employed in domestic service, with rarely recorded labor arrangements, only occasionally litigated the terms of their agreements in court; notarial records and similar sources seldom depicted their lives.Footnote 4 One can find clues about the labor conditions in domestic service and the logic of the labor market faced by the legally free working poor here and there in police records, classified announcements in newspapers, or, occasionally, in literary sources.Footnote 5 Less commonly, these clues surface in judicial records.
The cases discussed here represent a type that appears only rarely: litigation over salaries initiated by women working as domestic servants. They are among a larger set of about five hundred cases from 1807 to 1900, found in the Judiciary Collection of the Rio de Janeiro National Archives, catalogued under general topics like “services” and “salaries.”Footnote 6 No more than thirty-seven court cases involved women as direct litigants, and fewer than a dozen were domestic workers.
The omnipresence of slavery certainly helps explain the scarcity of these types of cases. After all, the institution of slavery degraded the status of manual labor and generated a politics of domination strongly based on relations of dependence that slaves, freed persons, and, broadly, the free poor alike experienced.Footnote 7 It stands to reason, then, that “free” servants (and especially ones engaged in domestic labor) would work out both their labor arrangements and the disputes that sometimes arose from them not in the courts, but in the domestic sphere, under circumstances of strict personal subordination.
The particularities of these cases, unusual as they are in some ways, resist any attempt to draw historical generalizations from them. Yet these documents present such powerful and rare insights into both the minutiae of everyday social relations and larger sociohistorical processes that their value outweighs the analytical risks of overgeneralization.Footnote 8 Despite their exceptionality—or perhaps because of it—these cases offer the historian the rare opportunity to dig into usually inaccessible dimensions of the very private domain of domestic labor relations. They reveal people's complex expectations about work, the dynamics of personal dependence, and the world of intimacy and confidence (and distrust) inhabited by people whose voices the historian seldom hears. These cases also present the rare opportunity to discuss some of the historical possibilities that were present in the working lives of people who stood outside the social divide between slaves and slave owners in nineteenth-century Brazil. Finally, these cases provide an important standpoint from which to investigate how judicial authorities reacted to popular expectations about domestic labor relationships, in the larger context of the changing legal and social dynamics of labor relations in a slave society.
Wages of Intimacy: Demanding Wages for Domestic Work in the Legal Courts
The first cases I will discuss date from the first two decades after Brazilian independence (1822). In the Judiciary Collection of the Brazilian National Archives in Rio de Janeiro, they were the first involving women self-identified as domestic workers and were presented as “Ações de soldada”—the term that described, in the Portuguese legislation, lawsuits demanding wages.Footnote 9 They took place right after the passage of Brazil's first labor laws, which regulated both national and immigrant workers’ labor contracts.Footnote 10 At that time, public discussion about the end of the legal Atlantic slave trade raged as the country began to face the possible consequences of slavery's imminent end.
In July of 1830, Rita Maria da Conceição presented her plea to the judicial authorities in the city of Mariana, in the state of Minas Gerais.Footnote 11 Authorized by her husband, João Evangelista Maciel, Rita went before the local judge to claim the unpaid “wages for her personal services and the management of his household and business” from a man named Manoel Joaquim Pinheiro. According to her, Manoel had a small dry goods store (casa de negócio) in the village of Arraial Novo, in the parish of Forquim, in the district of Mariana, where she had worked for ten years without payment. She testified that she had performed domestic labor in Pinheiro's home, “serving him in all things concerned with the running (governo) of his house, including raising his hogs, cultivating his gardens, cooking, grinding his mill and doing his laundry,” trying to “please” him in all her duties.
The nature of the relationship between Rita and Pinheiro was the central element in the legal debate. On the subsequent occasions in the case, Rita stated that her relationship to Pinheiro had two intertwined dimensions: on the one hand, she was performing all the duties in his house and shop, contributing to his income and subsistence—in short, to the infrastructure of his everyday life. On the other hand, though, Rita also alleged that for part of the time when she was in Pinheiro's house she was his concubine. Her relationship to him was defined as teúda e manteúda, a common term used in the nineteenth century to signify that she lived with him under his roof as his kept woman.
Rita presented herself as a freed woman of color and, as such, declared that her work was worth the modest but unpaid sum of 300 réis a day.Footnote 12 As a former slave seeking compensation for more recent domestic work, she asked only for the same sum of money that it would have cost Pinheiro to “rent” a slave to perform the same tasks.Footnote 13
We do not know Pinheiro's color or his social status. Twenty witnesses—free and freed men and women of color (both “blacks” and “pardos,” or persons of mixed race), as well as white men—testified about the nature of the relationship between Rita and Pinheiro. None of their testimony suggests that Pinheiro was a well-off man. Yet despite the apparent social proximity of these two relatively poor litigants, their dispute gave rise to claims about Rita's behavior and morality that may have implicitly referred to her past as a slave.
To argue that Pinheiro owed her the wages (soldadas) that the law mandated in payment to people who provided personal services even when no fee had been agreed upon, Rita claimed that she had moved into Pinheiro's house in the first place because he had made her a promise of marriage. According to her, after breaking his promise, Pinheiro made a commitment to compensate Rita for her attention and services as a domestic worker. In contesting Rita's claims, Pinheiro's lawyer initially denied any kind of professional or emotional bond between his client and Rita Maria da Conceição, claiming that she had been his neighbor for some time and had rendered him occasional services. He also accused her of petty theft and of being a drunk. He eventually admitted that she had lived under his roof but was not a criada, a role that would have entitled her to receive regular payment.
Demanding wages as a kept woman was not a move without risks. Defining herself as teúda e manteúda (an expression impossible to translate that suggests not only a sexual and perhaps an emotional bond, but also financial dependency), and claiming this intimate relationship as the source of her entitlement, Rita was walking a thin moral line. She was married to another man and living a life of her own far from Pinheiro's house. She was not asking for financial compensation for sexual services of any kind and never discussed sex in her testimony, only incidentally mentioning it in response to the accusation of prostitution that Pinheiro's lawyer used among his arguments to discredit her. Rather, she was demanding wages for what she perceived as legitimate work in which the limits between personal service and intimacy were constantly blurred.
It was exactly that blurred line that the parties disputed in court, in light of the ambiguity of her own condition as both worker and concubine. Strikingly, the lower court judge in Mariana, likely exposed to local customs and familiar with concubinage as a type of labor arrangement,Footnote 14 ruled in favor of Rita's argument, compelling Pinheiro to make a settlement. Pinheiro contested the verdict, taking the case to the court of appeal in Rio de Janeiro (Tribunal da Relação). The magistrates in the higher court overturned the decision in 1834 citing insufficient proof that Rita and Pinheiro had made a formal arrangement about her wages, invalidating her claim and sentencing her to pay for legal expenses incurred in the lawsuit in the amount of 99$947 réis, the equivalent of about ten months of her expected earnings.
A second case concerned Francisca Perpétua Bernardina de Azevedo, who brought suit against the heirs of Valentim José dos Santos in 1833.Footnote 15 According to Francisca, she was originally from the neighboring province of Minas Gerais and had migrated to the country's capital city of Rio de Janeiro twenty years earlier, becoming a domestic servant at Valentim's house. Valentim was a wealthy man. The person in charge of the General Public Depository, he was the legal guardian responsible for goods, including slaves, under judicial dispute in the city of Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 16 He lived in Praia do Valongo, close to one of the busiest parts of Rio's waterfront in the early nineteenth century, the location also of the Depository and its entire staff.
Francisca testified that she went to live under Valentim's roof “to take care of his house, oversee his slaves, and to perform all services involving the interior of the house.” These tasks were “common for servants in this country,” and Valentim himself requested that she perform them because he lived (as he died) without being legally married. She further declared that “she remained under his roof, living and working, and performing [her] services with assiduity, with great effort, zealously, and faithfully,” until the day of her “master's (amo) death, without missing any of her obligations, to the profit of the household.”Footnote 17
Numerous witnesses gave statements that contested the details of Francisca's life before and after coming to Valentim's house. These presented Francisca as a white woman who had migrated to the capital city with several members of her family and had, at a certain point, served a prison term, for reasons that these documents do not explain. Her “whiteness” apparently had not been enough to protect her from poverty, personal dependency, or the legal vulnerability that left poor people under constant suspicion and exposed to arbitrary persecution by the city's police.Footnote 18 Despite her precarious socioeconomic position, Francisca managed to become an active—even if petit—entrepreneur, like other resourceful women of the poor and middling classes who skillfully made a living in both the households and the streets of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 19
According to Francisca, her work in Valentim's house entailed caring for slaves held in the Public Depository and sometimes even safeguarding her master's papers and promissory notes. Having worked for him for twenty years without a formal arrangement about her wages, she trusted that he would provide for her future by granting her some money or property in his last will and testament, as he had promised. When her employer died from a sudden illness, however, with his promises unfulfilled, Francisca saw her hopes for remuneration dashed. Valentim's daughter and son-in-law, soon after his death, contested Francisca's claims and refused to come to any formal, legal settlement. As a white woman living as a criada (servant) of a wealthy man, Francisca valued her own labor at 12$000 (twelve thousand réis) per month.
Damazo da Costa Pacheco, Valentim's son-in-law and the executor of his postmortem inventory, refused to answer Francisca's plea for arbitration of her unpaid wages. On the contrary, he accused her of taking advantage of her position and using the time during which she was under Valentim's roof to pursue her own business and profits. Along with the accusations of drunkenness and immoral behavior (a moralizing, gendered argument that unmarried women litigating in court commonly faced), Pacheco also claimed that Francisca had obtained a considerable patrimony, including seven slaves, jewelry, and other belongings. She had accumulated this relative wealth working in her own businesses, he contended, even using the slaves from the Public Depository in her quitandas (street vending stands).
According to Damazo, Francisca had not been a criada (maidservant), but rather Valentim's amásia (concubine), selfishly using his house and prerogatives to amass her own little fortune instead of faithfully managing and looking after Valentim's household and interests. Francisca had no grounds to expect financial compensation for her work. Indeed, even if she had been a servant, Damazo insisted, her master's liberalidades in allowing her pursue her own businesses while in his employ would have left her with sufficient income. Damazo even accused Francisca of leaving the house after Valentim's death, carrying away jewelry, gold and silver, personal papers, and even the pots and pans from the kitchen.
Once more, the contested nature of the relationship between Francisca and her deceased employer occupied the central role in the case. Francisca asserted her work commitment and consistently refused the depiction of her relationship to Valentim as a form of concubinage. On the contrary, she stressed the social distance between servant and master, maintaining that Valentim allowed her quitandas as a gesture of good will, unrelated either to her domestic service or wages or to any intimacy that she could have shared with him. She also denied that Valentim's “liberalities” had allowed her to escape from poverty.
The peculiarities of Valentim's trade would have explained the idiosyncrasies of the arrangement in which Francisca was involved. Despite the large socioeconomic gap that divided them, an obvious relationship of mutual confidence between them allowed her to be responsible for supervising the slaves in the deposit and safeguarding her master's valuables. According to Francisca and witnesses asked to confirm her statements, she cooked and cared for the slaves who fell ill, whose owners would usually pay her.
Damazo's lawyer disputed the nature of Francisca's work, making explicit how ambiguous her position in the household appeared, even to him. In his words:
Because it is against the customs in this Court [of Rio de Janeiro] to hire white, young and beautiful women to serve in the kitchen or in the living room. There is not a single person in the country who, under these circumstances, would accept work as a servant. The convention is, in general, to have them as concubines and treat them well. Her remuneration is ad libitum of the man to whom she is concubine.Footnote 20
Francisca's response, by way of her attorney, questioned how well Damazo actually knew his city, arguing that anyone living in Rio de Janeiro would certainly be aware of how much the head of a household needed a person of confidence who could deal with the “direction and economy” of a house full of slaves. These were responsibilities that no slave would be able or could be trusted to assume.
Francisca's claims only succeeded before the lower courts, where the judge dismissed, for lack of proof, the arguments made by Valentim's heirs that she was his concubine and had become wealthy by abusing her prerogatives. Following Damazo's appeal, which led to a trial in the Tribunal da Relação, however, the higher Court ruled twice against Francisca. She not only failed to receive the wages she had gone to court to claim but was also ordered to pay half of the legal fees, about 62$000 réis.
After the judge at the Tribunal da Relação ruled against her, Francisca complained about her first lawyer's lack of interest in her case. In fact, only one of the several witnesses called to testify on her behalf actually supported her version of the facts. Even those who asserted that she was an amásia gave an ambiguous account about her role in the household.
The court instructed all witnesses called to indicate whether Francisca was considered a maidservant (criada) or whether Valentim and his servants treated her as the mistress (senhora) of the house. For the modern reader, the witnesses do not provide a conclusive answer. One witness recalled that Francisca was in charge of the “domestic regime of the house,” and even ate at the same table as Valentim. Another, João Antonio de Azevedo, the doctor who treated Valentim throughout his long illness, despite having been an acquaintance of the household for ten years, was not sure about Francisca's place in the life of the deceased. When asked if Francisca was considered a servant or a mistress, he answered that he did not know but added that “during [Valentim's] illnesses, [Francisca] treated him with the same devotion and tenderness with which a married woman treats a husband.”Footnote 21
Amásia or Criada: Defining the Boundaries between Servant and Concubine
About twenty years separate these two court cases from the next similar one in the Judiciary Collection. This period saw the consolidation of the monarchy under D. Pedro II, a political transition accompanied by important legal innovations. The abolition of the illegal slave trade after 1850 and the issuing of the Commercial Code and the Land Law (Lei de Terras) in the same year completed the large legal framework that affected, in one way or another, the context in which workers (free and unfree) toiled, planned, and negotiated labor arrangements.Footnote 22 And yet, these broad legal changes barely affected the ways in which Brazilian domestic workers presented their pleas for wages.
In 1857, Maria Theresa da Conceição had better luck when presenting her case in Bananal, a town in the coffee plantation area of the Paraíba valley in the Province of São Paulo. Here too the man whom Theresa had served for a decade without payment died without fulfilling his promise of rewarding her labor.Footnote 23 In May 22, 1846, the late Alexandre Ribeiro Barbosa invited her to come to his house to work as his criada. She stayed for ten years and nine days, and in all this time “she always was employed in the service of the household, orchestrating and managing not only all that is particular to a house, but also cultivating the field.” The court records describe Alexandre as arreador de tropa, the man responsible for hitching the pack of mules with which he carried coffee to the markets on the coast. He was also a small sharecropper and owned a couple of slaves and their children, who cultivated a small coffee field on a piece of land that belonged to one of his business associates. Much of that agricultural work happened far from his view because of his frequent absences travelling with the pack.
According to Maria Theresa, before departing on his last journey (from which he did not return alive) to fulfill a promise to Our Lady of Aparecida, whose sanctuary lay in Guaratinguetá about a hundred miles from Bananal, Alexandre lent her two-hundred thousand réis. In addition to this loan, she also asked Alexandre for three hundred thousand réis as compensation for each year she had labored, a sum that added up to more than three contos de réis.
Contradicting Maria Theresa's petition, José Eloi Machado, the lawyer and custodian of Barbosa's estate in abeyance, presented a different picture: poor and helpless, Theresa resided in Barbosa's home as his “amásia, teúda e manteúda,” being “sustained, dressed and cured of her maladies at the cost of the deceased.” According to this version of the facts, while she lived in Alexandre's house, she wrongly accumulated some possessions: a mule, more than twenty pigs, some poultry, and some money, all things alleged as belonging to Barbosa's estate.
Witnesses before the court allow us to reconstruct the relationship between Maria Theresa and Alexandre Barbosa. Manoel Vicente Ferreira, a fifty-year-old man who described himself as “pardo, married, living from his crops,” declared that he knew Theresa from her previous life as a prostitute living in a room in the town of Bananal. According to him, she came to live with Barbosa as his concubine and not as a servant. Delminda Maria Rosa, a twenty-five-year-old seamstress who had known Theresa as a prostitute living on Rua do Fogo years before, gave similar testimony. Answering the question about Theresa's place in Barbosa's house, she declared that, “by the way he treated her, she seemed to be his amásia, [because] Barbosa treated her very well.”Footnote 24
That was also the opinion of João Thomé Valente, a pharmacist who visited Batista's house more than once, and who witnessed Theresa treating Batista in his illnesses “zealously, giving him medicine and soup.” He also added that the same occurred when Theresa fell ill: Batista asked the pharmacist “to treat her carefully, in giving her all curative she needed … because she had helped him so much.”Footnote 25
All witnesses answered the same question: was she a criada or an amásia? Once again, their replies challenged the idea of a clear boundary between the two: her work as a housekeeper was never contested. Theresa was “responsible for the house” during the many times Batista was away on his long travels with the mule pack. She assisted his two slaves working in the small farm where they planted coffee and helped them in the many tasks related to the processing of the coffee beans. She was also responsible for caring for the slaves’ children while their parents were in the fields. One witness, Francisco de Paula Gavião, a married white farmer, recounted that Batista explained to him Maria Theresa's importance in his life: “as his caseira (housekeeper), she took good care of all the service of the house and also raised his crioulos,Footnote 26 and so he neither needed to marry nor to hire anyone to do those tasks.” Gavião added that, when he visited Barbosa, he always saw Theresa, “dirty, sun-burned and working.”Footnote 27
The difference between a servant and a concubine stood at the very center of the opposing lawyer's argument. According to the lawyer's account, a servant was fundamentally different from a concubine because the former was “someone obliged to serve.” The relationship of concubinage, by contrast, depended on the “mutual exchange of services.” He added:
A woman who enters a man's house as a servant [criada] …, motivated only by the payment or gratification, does not expect affection or indulgence, and her right is grounded only in her work; however, a concubine binds herself to a man with the end of being protected and supported by him to avoid the horrors of public and scandalous prostitution, and even develops some bonds of affection. She usually repays with the domestic care that such gratitude demands, without considering that she has a right to a salary or to forced compensation.Footnote 28
Despite the lawyer's pithy definition of both concubinage and servitude, establishing the boundaries between service and concubinage was rather a complicated task. His argument, however, does reveal a good deal about the anxieties present in the social, economic, and moral battles that silently raged in Brazilian households in the nineteenth century. Moral concerns raised the stakes of where this line would be drawn, as the final litigation of Maria Theresa's case exemplified. After a decision favorable to her, an appeal sent the lawsuit to the Tribunal da Relação, whose members sustained the original verdict. From there, Barbosa's attorney directed a final plea to the highest court in the country, the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal de Justiça). There, a different lawyer became responsible for the case against Theresa: the politician and former Minister of Justice José Thomaz Nabuco de Araújo, a barrister in the Supremo.Footnote 29
Araújo argued that the nature of the arrangement between Barbosa and Theresa was indecent (torpe) and could not be a source of rights:
Fruitful and valued as they might be, the services performed by [Theresa] for the deceased Barbosa were founded in the indecent institution of concubinage; and the law that rejects someone in her condition cannot serve as a source for the entitlements for which she appeals. … And the time in which the appellant lived in Barbosa's house and delivered to him services fit for a servant cannot be mentioned, because services should be distinguished by their origin, and not their quality.Footnote 30
In other words, “service” should not be defined by the nature of the tasks but by the conditions under which they were performed. More than sexual moralism defined these concerns. In continuing his argument, Araújo suggested that in deciding in favor of Maria Theresa, the judge would be opening the door for more disturbing scenarios. Why not, he asks, extend to the concubine the same legal rights of community propriety that the law granted to the legally married woman? Such a moral order would not only hold for poor people like Barbosa but also for the affluent (like Araújo himself and the judge, we can presume). That decision, he insisted, not only would “set a shameful precedent” in terms of “public morality,” but would also hurt “the Sanctity of Judgments, the dignity of the Courts, the stability of property.”Footnote 31
In connecting property rights to the morality of concubinage, Nabuco de Araújo's telling statement shows very clearly that a fundamental matter in the dispute was the unspoken value of the female work performed within the context of the household. A woman's claim to property ownership, including a proprietary claim to the fruits of her labor in the form of wages, could only be stabilized and disciplined in two ways: either within the legal framework of marriage, or in the contractual form of an impersonal “exchange of services” that was completely at odds with the labor arrangements that existed in actual households, which so often framed domestic work as unpaid dependency.
Despite its pristine legal reasoning, Araújo's definition of what a proper relationship between master and servant should be failed to resolve the contradictions that were the real matter of the legal dispute or the social relations that this definition attempted to encompass. Notwithstanding Araújo's reputation as a legal expert and his undeniable political prestige, his erudite refutation was unpersuasive. In an uncommon outcome, the Supreme Court sustained the original sentence that granted Theresa her unpaid wages. A definitive understanding of the limits between criada and amásia was clearly difficult to establish.
What the Servant Owns
Maria Theresa da Conceição's petition for her unpaid wages illuminates further the contradictions present both in social practice and in the legal understanding of domestic work. An important argument against her was the accusation that the objects she claimed as her belongings—a mule, some other animals, some credit in money—were incompatible with her position as a servant. A similar argument, on a different scale, had discredited Francisca Perpétua Bernardina de Azevedo—that during her time living and working for Valentim José dos Santos she also pursued her own interests in her quitandas.
Accusations of stealing, disregarding the master's interests and the service of the house, or abusing their position and prerogatives for their own benefit: these customary charges against domestic servants were present, in one way or another, in the litigation presented here. They imply a fundamental question that is subtly present throughout: who owns the domestic servant's work?
Francisca Perpétua's argument about her relations with her master illuminates how those who performed domestic work and recruited domestic workers answered this question. Explaining the origin of the few possessions kept after her master's death, Francisca's lawyer argued:
It should not surprise anyone, because it is not new, that masters, because of friendliness or affection regarding their good servants, allow them time for their own pursuits, and sometimes even finance them in some business or quitanda in the free time left over after their domestic working day. And using these means, [the servants] do not put pressure on their masters to give them money for their wages.Footnote 32
Like the faithful slave who could be allowed to use his or her spare time to pursue some personal income, a “hard-working servant” like Francisca Bernardina should also expect similar indulgence. If a slave could accumulate savings for his or her future, why couldn't a domestic servant?Footnote 33
Francisca's lawyer built a strong argument connecting her informal earnings to the kindness of her master, implying that he and not she was entitled to her work and held control over the “free time left over after the domestic working day.” In doing so, he advanced an implicit definition of “service” that completely obliterated the border between work and dependency, thus complicating the notion of self-ownership that supposedly separated bonded from free workers. Other dimensions of ownership for domestic workers exhibited the same ambiguity: how to draw a line separating the master's possessions from the things belonging to a servant? Who owns the fruits of domestic work?
There was no clear answer to that question—at least, not an answer that stood outside of the matrix of conflict and negotiation between masters and servants. In richer households, perhaps it could be simpler where the liberalities of a “good master”—as Francisca Perpétua claimed was the case with the late Valentim dos Santos—would allow a faithful servant to earn, have, and keep possessions, often as an indirect form of compensation for his or her services (although in the shadow of the constant risk of being accused of stealing and other wrongdoings).
Further complications, both in practice and in legal terms, arose when the problem of ownership became the central issue of the legal dispute between masters and servants. Cases involving maidservants and poorer masters are especially revealing in this regard, because they show situations in which both master and servant worked side by side and shared their common poverty. An eloquent example appears in a case starting in 1878, when Anna Maria de Jesus, a fifty-two-year-old widow from Portugal, presented a petition against her former employer José J. Gonçalves Maia for recovery of unpaid wages in Rio de Janeiro. At the time of the petition, Maia, a Portuguese immigrant himself, was twenty years younger than Anna and was the owner of two taverns in the neighborhood of Santa Teresa. Anna testified that she had entered Maia's house as his domestic servant on October 28, 1870, because he needed someone “to do the cooking, laundering, and starching for him and his two assistants in the business.” In the tavern, she also cooked and delivered goods to customers and carried firewood, all “without a precise arrangement about her wages.” She had lived under his roof for seven years and four months when, according to her, “sick, old, and displeased” and facing the unbearable escalation of the services that she was asked to perform, she quit her job.Footnote 34
From Anna's, Maia's, and their witnesses’ testimonies, we learn more about what was at stake in their arrangement. According to her own testimony, Anna left her previous job as criada in João Antonio Munhoz's household (casa de família), where she had been earning a monthly stipend of 25$000 réis, seduced by Maia's promise of a better wage, a healthful working environment in Santa Teresa's pleasant hills, and space to raise her chickens.Footnote 35 Moreover, in changing jobs Anna took the opportunity to replace the stricter rules governing a family home with a more flexible arrangement with a single man. When she moved into Maia's home, the Portuguese “tavern-keeper” lived and conducted his business in what the witnesses all described as a slum. The witnesses also agreed in their portrayal of Anna as Maia's concubine and housekeeper. The nature of her services were not disputed, even if their meaning was contested. Maia's lawyer claimed:
… the petitioner and the petitioned cohabitated, she as his concubine (amásia), and as such was vulgarly known as the shop's woman (a mulher da venda) or Dona Anna from the shop (D. Anna da venda); she managed the sales clerks, raised chickens, sold eggs, washed and starched, delivered meals to customers, … but everything on her own, without any profit or money to the petitioned from these petty trades—she, ultimately, would not perform services suitable to a wage-earning servant (criada assalariada), but only those compatible with the communion in which she lived with the petitioned, compensated by shelter, food, friendship, a common bed, and caresses.Footnote 36
Clearly, Dona Anna did not agree with the idea that friendship, a common bed, and caresses were a proper way to pay for services rendered.Footnote 37 By the time she left José Maia's house, he had become the owner of two taverns in Santa Teresa, no longer lived in a slum, and was about to marry a younger woman. Anna's toil, by contrast, yielded her far less. When the Tribunal da Relação ruled against her plea on the grounds that she was unable to present written proof of her labor agreement, she received the news while interned in the hospital and almshouse of the Irmandade do Carmo, battling illness. At the conclusion of the case, she had to pay the legal fees.
Relationships between men initially of modest means and the women to whom they were connected through the labor of everyday life were a constant feature in these court cases. Such labor exploitation, seemingly submitted to voluntarily, often connected to expectations of protection, inheritance, and even marriage. Broken promises sent some of these women to court.
These cases also suggest that vulnerability in the face of poverty impacted men and women differently; once their contracts were broken, lives diverged. As with Anna, who based her argument on the impossibility that José Maria would thrive without her labor, litigants in these court cases lost more than unpaid wages. Far from serving only as reproductive labor, their domestic work was made material in the production and reproduction of actual property, and in the prosperity of the men for whom these women strove and from whom they expected compensation. But they lost respect as well as compensation. The blurred boundary between criada and amásia, between work and concubinage, exposed women to the legal vulnerability of property ownership outside legal marriage.Footnote 38
In a context in which legal marriage and legitimate inheritance guaranteed the lawful and regulated maintenance and transfer of property, concubinage could be tolerated for single and some married men, but under the tacit but clearly understood condition that it would never create any entitlement whatsoever for the concubine. Being a senhora did not entail any legal right without a proper marriage; it conferred no access to property and no claim to inheritance.
The lack of legitimacy confined the unofficial (sexual and labor) contract to the informality of domesticity, controlled by men.Footnote 39 The service labor of concubines was to derive from gratitude; their wages became a function of their masters’ generosity. In the words of Damazo da Costa Pacheco's attorney, women in this condition should be compensated ad libitum: according to the master's pleasure and desire.
The Ambiguity of Contract: Some Conclusions
In June 1876, Rosa Francisca Pereira presented a petition before the judge in Parahyba do Sul, a small town in the rural area of the province of Rio de Janeiro:
Having entered the house of Francisco Antonio Pinto … in January 1862, as his maidservant, with the obligation of rendering all the services belonging to her class, it happened that the aforementioned Francisco Antonio Pinto passed away on February 8 of the current year, leaving no declaration whatsoever about the payment or the amount of the wages due to her as the governor of his house, in which position she always dispensed her good services, not only helping him to acquire the possessions he has left, but also attending to him in his illness, without receiving any remuneration, for she trusted that the deceased was putting aside funds to save for her old age, which he would later liquidate to pay her wages (soldadas).Footnote 40
After the death of Francisco, a Portuguese citizen, single and without heirs, Rosa pleaded to have the remuneration of her services legally arbitrated, so that his estate in abeyance could pay her. In accepting her plea, the local judge convened the administrator responsible for Francisco's post mortem inventory, the Portuguese Consul, and the “Coletor de Rendas” (the financial authority of the municipality), as well as the witnesses indicated by Rosa. From their testimony, we learn that before moving to Francisco's house, Rosa had been the slave of a man named Esteves Pereira. Around 1862, Francisco had organized a collection of funds to pay for Rosa's freedom, and thereafter she lived under her benefactor's roof, “helping and working in the service of the house.” Francisco had been a very sick man and, according to one witness, “could not find anyone who nursed him better than the aforementioned supplicant.”Footnote 41 All witnesses agreed that, despite being undisputedly Francisco's “criada,” he never paid her anything.
No one contested Rosa's case, and ad hoc arbitrators set her wages at 20$000 réis per month. The local judge decided in Rosa's favor. A legal technicality sent her lawsuit to the Court of Appeal in Rio de Janeiro, where the judge dismissed the case arguing that Rosa's condition as criada was never proven, because she was unable to provide written proof of her contract. Like the other women, Rosa was sentenced to pay the costs of the proceedings.
It is possible that the necessity of the written contract was a sign of the times. Specific laws regarding the regulation of labor contracts appeared from 1830 onward, as Brazilian lawmakers sought to produce a legal environment better suited to the introduction of free immigrant workers and to regulate other labor contracts signed by free (and freed) nationals.Footnote 42 Even former slaves like Rosa were fully aware of the legal language of the free labor contract, at least after the “Free Womb” law of September 28, 1871, introduced the obligation of recently freed slaves to contract their labor or face the penalties reserved for vagrants, like forced labor and prison.Footnote 43 We can find some of these contracts in the records of nineteenth-century Brazilian public notaries.Footnote 44
Despite the prevailing language of the contract in the law and in the legislators’ expectations of the so-called transition to free labor, the female domestic workers who appeared in these cases drew their legal arguments from an ancient body of civil law rather than from the then-current notion of contractual obligations. One possible explanation lies in the greater appropriateness of the Philippine Ordinances—the sixteenth-century compilation of Portuguese laws that held force in Brazil both before and after independence—for cases involving the unequal and very personal relations between masters and servants. The liberal concept of “contract” behind the new labor laws, which defined a labor arrangement as an impersonal agreement based on financial compensation for work, fit very poorly with the intimate nature of domestic service.
With the erosion of slavery during the second half of the nineteenth century and the increasing number of immigrants in Brazilian cities, free women performing domestic service in urban households increasingly became the rule. The challenges and contradictions they experienced in this changing legal and social landscape, however, continued to be rooted in older practices of unpaid dependency that very often defined the informal arrangements of domestic service.
For this reason, domestic labor continued to occupy a very ambiguous place in the legal landscape that took shape in nineteenth-century Brazil; the laws regulating the conditions of an emerging free labor market never explicitly mentioned it. Only in the 1880s, especially following the abolition of slavery in 1888, did the regulation of domestic labor through legislation come to the fore of public debate. Concerns about private morality and domesticity belonged to the anxieties of the urban Brazilian political elites in the last decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote 45 Regulations for domestic labor appeared at the municipal and provincial legislative levels but never succeeded at the national level. Laws explicitly addressed domestic labor as a separate sphere of work relations to be closely controlled by the police, who would keep records of servants’ behavior and ensure the enforcement of their contracts. Opposed by both masters and servants—the former owing to the unwanted interference of the state in the matters of the household, and the latter because of the regulations’ coercive character—these short-lived regulations illustrate, yet again, how domestic labor occupied a singular and ambiguous place in the broader field of Brazilian labor relations as a whole. Both the law and social norms defined labor relations in the domestic sphere as a mutual favor, equated work with “help” offered in gratitude, and considered wages to be a product of voluntary benevolence.
What, then, do we make of these apparently eccentric cases, which, with one exception, succeeded in the lower courts but failed in their final appeals? These women were certainly atypical. Most domestic workers had a firm understanding of their position in the households where they toiled and their interactions with masters—men and women alike—consistently reminded them of their subordination. But the expectations, conflicts, and demands of most domestics never found their way into the courts, at least not at the times and in the places discussed in this article. It is for this very reason that these exceptional cases are so valuable; they are replete with clues about a world of social relations, anxieties, and expectations that were certainly shared by many other laborers, and especially free poor women employed in domestic work.
The archival documents available to us do not reveal how these cases reached the courts, but they came from disparate parts of Brazil at different times and were argued by different lawyers, suggesting that this was not the crusade of one activist attorney seeking justice for wronged women, but rather represent one possible expression of shared and contested understandings of work in nineteenth-century Brazil. In that sense, they are analogous to other cases in which workers sued for their wages, such as the handful of men who went before the courts to dispute unpaid wages as servants (criados), the many shop clerks (caixeiros) who fought for monetary compensation for broken promises of salaries and partnership, and the others who tried to use the judicial system to articulate their demands in the language of labor.
But these cases are also unique, as they reveal very specific dimensions of the domestic world of labor and intimacy that rarely left traces for posterity. The female protagonists in these cases demanded compensation in the form of monetary wages and entitlements that clearly defined their connection to their masters (who were also, sometimes, their lovers) as a work relationship. These women chose to expose their personal stories, and even the very intimate details about their lives, in the public space of the court, challenging the social conventions of female modesty and private morality and articulating demands for rights.
We will probably never know whether these women independently developed an understanding of their relationships as work arrangements or whether they adopted the language of labor to claim their reparations as the only legal crack through which they could pry open the Brazilian judicial system to fight against what they perceived as flagrant injustice. But in presenting their claims, they actively connected their work to their expectations of rights in a way that was uncommon not only for women in their position but also for most men, anticipating notions of labor rights that only decades later were articulated in law and political discourse,Footnote 46 and which still today constitute a fundamental dimension of Brazilian labor struggles.
