Title: Libertas entre sobrados: contratos de trabalho doméstico em São Paulo na derrocada da escravidão
Abstract:The research assembles the social experiences of slave women, released and free descendants in São Paulo during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in the social process of transition from sla...The research assembles the social experiences of slave women, released and free descendants in São Paulo during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in the social process of transition from slave work to freedom.In order to accomplished our aim, we rummage into the books, subscriptions and free employment contracts, requirements established by Municipal ordinances on "Criadas e Amas de Leite", from 1886.The ensemble of regulations was made in order to formalize the duties and obligations for employers and free employees , in the context of hasty urban growth the advanced process of abolition and the immigration policy that led, to the main city, poor immigrants and unruly people.Migrants from provincial slavery region sand those slaveholders who provided slaves to an interprovincial trafficking, mainly free African born, were employed in the elite and urban middle classes residences.We glimpse the survival strategies from poor and free agents of the housework registered by the police during the final years of the slave regime.Displaced from profitable activities in the context of low economic diversification, formers slaves and free descendants survived from meager gains earned from these socially unskilled services of which the members of the elite and middle classes depended and profited: farmers, foreigners hotel owners, colonels, civil servants, professional, widows and poor remedied.Our research attempt to reconstruct the daily life of several "jobs" that these free women have done in the new social order: the kitchen, washing and ironing clothes, cleaning the house, care and feeding children, traffic in the streets, the riverside and the tense environment of the houses.Reading between the lines of texts, it is possible to observe the existence of released women willing to improvise various ways of resistance and rejection of everyday oppression.Their experience makes possible ways of non-negotiable freedom, refusing, with their misbehavior, the days of exhausting work, consequently, winning wage increases, caring for their patients and the possibility of sharing housing with their partners and children.With the further abandon of the traditional townhouses, they eventually avoid the sexual harassment and the bad treatment: sojourn of domestic and persistent slavery, that these women, with their daily practices, have dared to decline.Read More