IRSH, Page 1 of 29 doi:10.1017/S002085901700061X
© 2018 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
Maids, Clerks, and the Shifting Landscape of Labor
Relations in Rio de Janeiro, 1830s–1880s
HENRIQUE ESPADA LIMA
Departamento de História, Universidade Federal de Santa
Catarina – UFSC, CEP: 88040–900, Florianópolis
Santa Catarina, Brazil
E-mail: henrique.espada@ufsc.br
FABIANE POPINIGIS
Departamento de História, Universidade Federal Rural do
Rio de Janeiro – UFFRJ, CEP: 23890–000, Seropédica
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
E-mail: fpopinigis@gmail.com
ABSTRACT: This article focuses on the lives of workers in small commerce and in
domestic service in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. It seeks to understand both
what united and what differentiated maids (criadas) and clerks (caixeiros), two types
of laborers whose lives and work had much in common, and two categories of labor
that, although ubiquitous, are frequently overlooked in Brazilian labor history. We
consider how, together, class, gender, and race shaped the divergent trajectories of
criadas and caixeiros over the course of the nineteenth century, and what the legal
disputes in which they were involved during that period can teach us about the
shifting dynamics in labor relations in a society marked by both slavery and labor
dependency more broadly. As sources for this analysis, we draw on documents
produced by legal proceedings from the 1830s through the 1880s, in which men and
women involved in petty commerce and domestic service presented their cases before
the courts to claim their unpaid wages.
In recent years, Brazilian labor history has shown how the study of urban,
non-industrial activities provides us with a privileged vantage from which
to consider the connections between economic relations, the social and
occupational structure of cities, and the ways in which workers have
intervened in political life. New studies of urban labor have contributed
significantly to an effort to re-think both the range of research questions
and the general explanatory framework through which we have considered
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Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
workers’ experiences. This effort has been carried out through the intense
analysis of a variety of types of primary sources and, at the same time, has
gained theoretical and methodological inspiration from microhistory, from
English social history, and, more recently, from international debates
concerning the intersection of class, gender, and race.1
This article focuses on the lives of workers in small commerce and in
domestic service in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, and thus it is
indebted to the debate concerning the social history of urban labor in
Brazil. At the same time, this study contributes to this debate by focusing
on two types of workers who, although among the most ubiquitous in the
city, have been overlooked as a source of insight on how urban laborers
confronted the era’s transformations. Concentrating on Rio de Janeiro
during the Brazilian post-independence period of constitutional monarchy
known as the Empire (1822–1889), in which it functioned as the country’s
capital, this article places at the center of its analysis a city that experienced
the economic, sociopolitical, institutional, and legal changes that characterized both Brazil and the broader Atlantic world in the nineteenth
century in an almost emblematic way. As the main commercial and political
center of the country and a space for the circulation of people and goods
that connected at least three continents, the city of Rio was a site of
experimentation for legal and institutional innovations. Rio de Janeiro was
one of the most important slave-holding cities in the Americas and also
the destination of thousands of immigrants of various nationalities.
Nineteenth-century Brazil’s capital city thus provides a privileged point of
view from which to consider the changing urban social structure, as well as
the ambiguous dividing lines between enslaved, dependent, and free labor,
and the transformations to the social composition of the laboring classes.
Recent studies of social stratification in cities have primarily focused their
attention on the lives and social and economic strategies of the intermediate
social sectors, which fit poorly within the dichotomy so central to
nineteenth-century Brazil between the propertied elites, on the one hand,
and the enslaved persons subordinated to those elites on the other. Such
studies demonstrate that the numerically significant presence of these
1. An incomplete list of these studies includes: Maria Odila Dias, Power and Everyday Life. The
Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995); Sidney
Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar e botequim. O cotidiano dos trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle
Époque (São Paulo, 1986); Sheila Faria, “Sinhás Pretas, Damas Mercadoras: as pretas minas nas
cidades do Rio de Janeiro e São João del Rei (1700–1850)” (Tese de Titular, Universidade Federal
Fluminense, 2004); Elciene Azevedo, J. Cano, Maria Cunha, and Sidney Chalhoub (eds), Trabalhadores na Cidade. Cotidiano e Cultura no Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo, séculos XIX e XX
(Campinas, 2009); Fabiane Popinigis, “‘Aos pés dos pretos e pretas quitandeiras’. Experiências de
trabalho e estratégias de vida em torno do primeiro Mercado Público do Desterro, 1840–1890”,
Afro-Asia, 46 (2012), pp. 193–226; Juliana Farias, Mercados Minas. Africanos ocidentais na Praça
do Mercado do Rio de Janeiro (1830–1900) (Rio de Janeiro, 2015).
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
3
workers in Brazilian cities has garnered far less scholarly attention than they
deserved.2 It was precisely from this heterogeneous social stratum, which
consists of free men and women, freedpersons of African origin, and the
Luso-Brazilian poor and working classes, in addition to foreign immigrants
of various nationalities and legal statuses, that some of the century’s most
important social actors in Brazilian political and social life emerged. These
men and women made up the urban middle classes as well as a large part of
the urban laboring sectors, which were the socioeconomic sectors best
positioned to aspire to upward social mobility and most able to organize
themselves to fight for the recognition of the dignity of their work and of
their political rights.3
At the fringes of this intermediary social group were those more or less
impoverished (but not necessarily miserable) workers who were involved in
a myriad of urban activities that were connected to the infrastructure that
kept the city functioning. They were the less skilled civil construction
workers, those who worked in various forms of urban transportation, the
non-proprietary laborers in small commercial establishments, and the men
and women involved in various types of domestic labor who were free, but
often worked side by side with the enslaved.
This article seeks to understand both what united and differentiated one
group of domestic laborers (female maids, or criadas), on the one hand, and
one group of workers in small commerce (male clerks, or caixeiros) on the
other, two types of non-enslaved laborers whose lives and work had much
in common, and two categories of labor that are frequently overlooked in
Brazilian labor history. We will consider what their divergent trajectories
over the course of the nineteenth century can teach us about the shifting
dynamics in labor relations in a society marked by both slavery and labor
dependency more broadly. As sources for this analysis, we will draw on
documents produced by legal proceedings from the 1830s through the
1880s in which men and women involved in petty commerce and domestic
service presented their cases before the courts to claim their unpaid wages.
The principal objective here is to relate the ways in which, in the course of
the nineteenth century, these workers’ experiences in “serving” both
approximated and diverged from each other as they lived through the social
2. Zephyr Frank, “Layers, Flows and Intersections: Jeronymo José de Mello and Artisan Life in
Rio de Janeiro, 1840s–1880s”, Journal of Social History, 41:2 (2007), pp. 307–328; Zephyr Frank,
Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque, NM,
2004).
3. Fabiane Popinigis, Proletários de Casaca. Trabalhadores do comércio carioca (1850–1911)
(Campinas, 2007); Osvaldo Maciel, A Persistência dos Caixeiros. O mutualismo dos trabalhadores
do comércio em Maceió (Recife, 2011); Artur Vitorino, Máquinas e Operários. Mudança técnica e
sindicalismo gráfico (São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro, 1858–1912) (São Paulo, 2000); Marcelo MacCord,
Artífices da Cidadania. Mutualismo, educação e trabalho no Recife Oitocentista (Campinas, 2012).
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4
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
processes that profoundly altered the history of labor in Brazil: the transformation of the legal paradigms that had been developing to regulate and
organize contracts and commercial relationships; the imposition of new
forms of control over urban labor; the slow decline and eventual abolition
of slavery; and the social reconfiguration of the urban working classes and
the means by which they might claim their rights.
C R I A D A S A N D C A I X E I R O S I N T H E E X PA N S I O N O F U R B A N
S E RV I C E S : U N S TA B L E B O U N D A R I E S
The extraordinary development of the city of Rio de Janeiro in the first
decades of the nineteenth century was marked by two politically fundamental events: first, the transfer of the Portuguese royal court to the colonial
city in 1808; and second, the political independence of the colony and its
transformation into the Brazilian Empire in 1822, with the city serving as
the site of the nation’s capital and the headquarters of the royal court. Rio
thus consolidated its role as the most important link connecting the country
with Atlantic markets, which brought about an increase in commercial
activity and allowed for an impressive accumulation of wealth.4 Rio’s newfound economic strength affected urban life in many ways, but what
interests us here, in particular, is the resulting expansion of consumption
and the exponential growth of services and of all types of trade. The demand
for a variegated labor force made the city a major center for the importation
of both enslaved and contract immigrant workers, with profound consequences for its social dynamics.
Demographic data gives us a clear idea of the extent of the impact of this
process on the city. Its population in 1821 was approximately 112,000, half
of whom were enslaved. In 1849, around 110,000 enslaved workers lived in
Rio de Janeiro’s parishes, out of a total population of approximately 226,000
inhabitants, a third of whom had been born in Africa.5 Immigrant workers,
primarily Portuguese ones, made up a considerable part of the remaining
free population: in 1846, a representative of the Portuguese Crown estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 of their compatriots lived in the city.6
4. Lyman L. Johnson and Zephyr Frank, “Cities and Wealth in the South Atlantic: Buenos Aires
and Rio de Janeiro before 1860”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48:3 (2006), pp.
634–668. See also: Zephyr Frank, “Wealth Holding in Southeastern Brazil, 1815–60”, Hispanic
American Historical Review, 85:2 (2005), pp. 223–258.
5. Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Époque. Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-century
Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge, 1987), p. 22; Luís Felipe Alencastro, “Vida privada e ordem privada no
Império”, in L. Alencastro (ed.), História da vida privada no Brasil – Império. A corte e a modernidade
nacional (São Paulo, 1997), p. 25.
6. Rosana Barbosa Nunes, “Imigração portuguesa para o Rio de Janeiro na primeira metade do
século XIX”, Historia & Ensino, 6 (2000), pp. 163–177, 170.
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
5
Among the poor free laborers, whether immigrants or native-born, a sizeable portion worked in either commerce or domestic service.
The proliferation of both caixeiros and criadas resulted from this same
growing demand for urban services in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.
These two groups’ life experiences also converged in the particularities of
their daily labor in private homes and commercial establishments, where
work and life were elaborately intertwined. Most of these individuals resided in the homes and commercial establishments in which they worked,
having neither accommodation of their own, nor any defined work
schedule, carrying out an innumerable array of subaltern tasks. These two
categories of workers thus shared a high level of domesticity and participation in the lives of their employers, with various levels of intimacy, and,
relatedly, few opportunities for privacy and time to attend to their personal
lives. This characteristic of their work and personal lives was intensified by
the fact that both caixeiros and criadas were often recruited from the ranks
of the city’s youth, who had dependent relationships with and sometimes
even family ties to their bosses.7 The particular type of dependency that
characterized these relationships was sometimes reflected in the forms of
remuneration that they were offered for their work, where it was difficult to
draw a clear line between an employer’s obligation to provide training and
sustenance on the one hand, and payment for services rendered on the other.
Criado and caixeiro do not describe stable and well-defined occupations
and statuses inside private homes or businesses. Each of these words is a
superficially straightforward, but essentially untranslatable term that
denote a common occupation in nineteenth-century Rio; in English they
roughly translate as, respectively, “maid” and “clerk”. Yet, as this article will
show, the words criado and caixeiro carry with them a cloud of contextual
assumptions that make these terms, themselves, precious historical artifacts.
For this reason, they appear throughout this article in their original
Portuguese form.8 The levels of responsibility and trust that these laborers
7. Lenira Martinho shows that, from a sample of documents mentioning the ages of Portuguese
immigrants who were employed as caixeiros in the late 1820s, almost three quarters of them were
between ten and nineteen years old. Lenira Menezes Martinho and Riva Gorenstein, Negociantes e
Caixeiros na Sociedade da Independência (Rio de Janeiro, 1993), p. 80. On the relationship
between paternalism and domestic labor, see Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The
Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Austin, TX, 1992).
8. Caixeiro directly translates into the English word “cashier” and is still in use today in the
generic sense of someone who is in charge of the cash register in retail business. It derives from the
Portuguese word caixa, which generally denotes a “box”, but also refers to both a “cash register”
and the person who operates it. In nineteenth-century Brazil, the word took on a broader meaning
and was used to describe any clerk or servant working in any capacity in a commercial establishment. The word criado, and its feminine form criada, have more obviously domestic connotations, meaning someone who, not being part of the family, was created or educated within the
household. (The word criar means “to raise”, including to raise a child.) The word criado has long
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6
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
enjoyed, as well as the type of activities they carried out, shaped hierarchical
relationships within the workplace, which, in turn, were reflected in their
levels of autonomy and their expectations concerning their remuneration.
These hierarchies also grew out of discrimination based on gender, skin
color, age and nationality, and they occupied a central place in these
workers’ lives. The problem of confronting these hierarchies was made even
more dramatic for Rio’s workers because they lived in a society where most
manual labor was, in fact, carried out by enslaved persons, who were
expected to be submissive and subservient.
This overview of the relative position of criadas and caixeiros gives us a
useful point of departure, but it is not sufficient to elucidate either the specificities of the work and pay arrangements that involved these two categories of
workers, or the tensions that beset their daily lives. In the pages to follow, we
will thus subject a selection of legal cases involving labor arrangements worked
out within private homes and businesses to detailed analysis, allowing us a
closer view of the transformations these types of workers experienced and
their relationship to the law over the course of the nineteenth century.
One of these legal cases is from April 1833, when Jacintho Almeida sued
his former employer, Francisco da Costa, for wages he had never received.
According to Almeida, his boss owed him for the final three years during
which he had worked in Costa’s small grocery store in Rio de Janeiro’s port
district.9 Almeida further explained that he had only received part of his
total annual wages of 300$000 réis,10 and that his former boss owed him a
debt of 758$620 réis, the payment of which he sought in court.
been generalized in Portuguese to describe any servant or personal assistant and extended to all
adults working in a household, to which the person did not necessarily have any previous connection. The word was already employed in that sense in the Ordenações Filipinas, a corpus of
Early Modern Portuguese laws: “Título XXIX. Do criado, que vive com o senhor a bem-fazer, e
como se lhe pagará”, in Ordenações Filipinas, 5 vols (Rio de Janeiro, 1870), Livro IV, p. 807. Note
that the English “maid” has a clear gender connotation, whereas criado and criada are two separate
words that specifically refer to a male or female domestic worker, respectively. While shifts in the
gender composition of both “clerks” and “domestic workers/maids” in nineteenth-century Rio
are at the heart of this article, for reasons of readability and in keeping with common usage in
nineteenth-century Brazil, in this article we mostly use the female form in the case of “maids”
(criadas) and the male for “clerks” (caixeiros). One important exception is the use of criado in legal
texts, which only takes the generic masculine form.
9. “Apelação Cível. Apelante: Francisco José da Costa. Apelado: Jacintho Ignacio de Almeida,
1834”, Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro [hereafter, ANRJ], Fundo: Tribunal da Relação do
Rio de Janeiro (84), n. 664, Maço 167, All judicial cases discussed in this article came before the
courts of appeal in the Brazilian capital city of Rio de Janeiro and were selected from a larger
sample of court cases that are held at the ANRJ and catalogued under the title “disputes over
salaries”.
10. Brazil’s basic currency unit in the nineteenth century was the real, but its basic denomination
came to be considered the mil réis (one thousand réis), written as 1$000. One thousand mil réis was
called one conto de réis, written as 1:000$000. Almeida’s monthly stipend as caixeiro can be
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
7
Figure 1. Map of Rio de Janeiro.
In his own version of the facts, Costa affirmed having put the management of his grocery store in Almeida’s hands not just as a simple caixeiro,
but instead as a “true administrator” (administrador) when he left for
Portugal in May 1831. Costa may have made this trip to avoid the effects of
the resurgence of anti-Portuguese sentiments that marked that year. These
conflicts dealt a powerful blow to the Portuguese small business owners
who dominated Rio’s petty commerce and provided most of the few work
opportunities available for the city’s free poor.11 In his testimony, Costa not
only stated that he owed nothing to Almeida, but he also asserted that, when
returning to Rio in 1833 and taking an inventory of his store, he discovered
that, in his absence, his former employee had sold merchandise on credit
without his permission. Worse still, he claimed that Almeida “came to enjoy
[his] establishment, taking from it both merchandise and money, and in this
way Almeida was able to set up his brother with his own small shop, which
estimated at 25$000 réis in the early 1830s. For purposes of comparison, an enslaved man who
worked as a cook was advertised in the pages of one of Rio’s newspapers in 1830 for rental for a
monthly fee of 12$000 (twelve-thousand réis), Correio Mercantil, 1:12 (1 September 1830), p. 47.
11. On 7 April 1831 Pedro I, the Emperor of independent Brazil, born in Portugal, abdicated the
Brazilian throne, thus allowing his son, Pedro II, who had been born on American soil, to take
over as the new Emperor. The conflicts between the pés-de-chumbo (literally “lead-foots”, as the
Portuguese immigrants were called) and cabras (“goats”, the nickname for poor, mixed-race
Brazilians) took over the streets of the city of Rio de Janeiro as well as other Brazilian provinces.
See Gladys Sabina Ribeiro, A liberdade em construção. Identidade nacional e conflitos antilusitanos no Primeiro Reinado (Rio de Janeiro, 2002).
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8
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
was probably just a front for selling Costa’s [stolen] merchandise, because
neither [Almeida, nor his brother] had anything of their own.”12 He
therefore refused to engage in any negotiation with Almeida concerning his
delayed wages as long as his former caixeiro failed to “produce an exact
accounting of the business”.
Among the witnesses called to testify were other shop employees and
owners of small businesses established on nearby streets. All attested to the
trusting relationship between Costa and his primary shop employee before
Costa’s trip. Witnesses on both sides also affirmed the difficulty of establishing the kind of commitment that existed between a boss and an
employee, providing information that corroborated the two conflicting
versions of the dispute. On the one hand, Almeida argued that he had been
Costa’s caixeiro, and therefore his employee and subordinate, who should
be payed a wage (soldada).13 On the other hand, Costa affirmed that he had
placed Almeida in the position of “administrator”, but that Almeida had not
carried out his obligations in accordance with that position. In his line of
argumentation, which was ultimately successful in winning this case,
Almeida’s attorney recurred to the Philippine Ordinances (Ordenações
Filipinas), a compilation of Portuguese laws that had been in effect since the
end of the sixteenth century and continued to be used in independent Brazil
until the first decade of the twentieth century. The argument directly cited
the conditions under which bosses could demand reparations for damages
done by criados to their amos (a word that means “master”, without
necessarily implying that the subordinate person is a slave), affirming, in
Almeida’s case, not just that the “damage” had not been proven, but also
that the demand had been made too late to have had any legal effect.14
Almeida won his case before the trial court judge, a decision that was later
confirmed by the final judgment (acórdão) rendered by the panel of
magistrates of the appellate court (Tribunal da Relação do Rio de Janeiro).
The judges ruled that Costa, the employer, had never established the terms
under which Almeida should carry out the administration of his business
affairs, which reinforced Almeida’s position as caixeiro rather than as an
actual business partner. In basing his legal defense on the difference between
an “administrator” and a “caixeiro”, Costa made a distinction that the law
12. “Apelação Cível. Apelante: Francisco José da Costa”, fo. 12 reverse side.
13. The notion of soldada, which we chose to translate as “wage”, is part of the legal vocabulary
used in the Ordenações Filipinas to describe financial compensation for work in different capacities. According to Raphael Bluteau’s eighteenth-century Portuguese dictionary, soldada comes
from the word soldo, meaning “the payment or stipend paid to a soldier, [and now] used to
describe the salary of anyone who serves”. R. Bluteau, Vocabulario Portuguez e Latino, 10 vols
(Coimbra, 1728), VII, pp. 699–700. All court cases discussed in this article refer to the chapters in
the Ordenações Filipinas that concern wages (soldadas): Libro IV, titles 29 to 34.
14. “Título XXXV: Do que demanda ao criado o dano, que lhe fez”, in Ordenações Filipinas,
Livro IV, p. 841–842.
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
9
did not recognize and followed a model of commercial law that would
only be established in Brazil two decades later. The provisions in the
Philippine Ordinances that required the boss to provide evidence of any
complaint against subordinate workers and to prove that he did not owe them
wages, ultimately strengthened Almeida’s case. The relationship between
Jacintho de Almeida and José da Costa certainly did not represent the average
labor dispute that developed in many businesses in Rio de Janeiro. In
this particular case, there was an evident level of proximity and trust between
the caixeiro and his employer, and Almeida’s position as the “first caixeiro”
and eventual administrator of his boss’s business placed him in a privileged
position to negotiate his wages. Disputes involving subaltern caixeiros
only rarely found their way into the courts and were seldom as well received
when they did.
An eloquent contrast with the case brought by Almeida can be found in a
civil case that took place at a similar time in the courts of Rio de Janeiro,
involving Francisca de Azevedo, a white woman from the neighboring state
of Minas Gerais. In 1835, she presented a “compensation suit” (ação de
soldadas) against the assets of her former employer, Valentim dos Santos.
Santos was the owner of a commercial enterprise near the Valongo quay, a
central area next to the city’s port. His activities certainly placed him in a
high social position, since his business served as the depository for the city’s
judicial courts.15 According to Francisca, she had been employed in
Valentim’s shop and in his home as a criada since “more than twenty years
ago, taking care of his house, overseeing the slaves, and carrying out all of
the tasks inside the house that are the proper work of criada”.16 Since they
had not made any specific agreement about her wages, she expected that her
accumulated earnings would be paid to her once her services were no longer
needed, as was customary in Rio de Janeiro. When her boss died without
leaving a will or an account of his assets, Francisca sought recourse in the
justice system, requesting the payment of her overdue wages, which she
determined to be the modest sum of 12$000 réis per month.
15. The General Public Depository was a judicial institution that held chattels whose possession
was under dispute, or which were being held as collateral in a judicial contest over money or
property in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It was managed by a private citizen performing public
duties. Occupying this position, Valentim dos Santos was responsible for the money, merchandise,
real estate, animals, and even slaves that were held in the Public Depository. He was responsible
for overseeing and maintaining these items until their eventual restitution to a legitimate owner or
sale at a public auction.
16. “Apelação Cível. Soldadas. Apelante: Damazo da Costa Pacheco. Apelada: Francisca Perpétua
Bernardina de Azevedo, 1835”, ANRJ Fundo: Tribunal da Relação do Rio de Janeiro (84), n. 2899,
Maço 218, Galeria C, fo. 5. All information concerning the case described here come from this file.
About this case, see also: Henrique Espada Lima, “Wages of Intimacy: Domestic Workers Disputing Wages in the Higher Courts of Nineteenth-Century Brazil’, International Labor and
Working-Class History, 88 (2015), pp. 11–29, 15–17.
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10
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
Damazo Pacheco, the executor of Valentim Santos’s will, argued that
Francisca de Azevedo had never been his criada, but rather his concubine
for twenty years; she had been, Santos stated, teúda e manteúda, a typical
expression of the day that unmistakably alluded to a consensual but highly
asymmetrical sexual relationship outside of wedlock, “a kept woman”. To
prove his argument, Pacheco affirmed that Francisca, during the time when
she lived in the General Depository (Depósito Geral), had built up her own
business by selling groceries and even acquiring her own slaves to that end.
Furthermore, according to Pacheco and several of the witnesses he called to
testify about the relationship between the two, Valentim and Francisca had
such a close, personal relationship that he entrusted her with the task of
managing his paperwork and promissory notes. In one of his most striking
arguments, Pacheco’s lawyer insisted that he could only imagine Francisca
as Valentim Santos’s lover, given her role in his house and store: “Because it
is not customary in this city to put pretty, young white women into service
in the kitchen and the living room [...]; [they are], conventionally, limited to
being a concubine and to being well treated.”17
Francisca never accepted the version of this story that portrayed her as
her boss’s lover, nor did she admit in the court documents to having had any
relationship with him that did not derive from her position as a criada da
casa, a domestic servant. She was, nonetheless, unable to prove her case
either through documentary evidence, or by offering witness testimony
attesting to the fact that she had been employed by Valentim, or that she had
made some arrangement with him concerning her remuneration. Francisca
lost the case; the judge denied her demand for her back pay.
By closely examining those details of the case on which both Francisca de
Azevedo and the witnesses agreed, however, we can extract a great deal of
information both about her daily work life and the ambiguous space she
occupied within Valentim dos Santos’s house and store where her employer
lived and conducted his business. The “General Warehouse labyrinth”18
was how Francisca’s lawyer, Antônio Picanço, described this space where
the boundaries between house and place of business were impossible to
establish. Francisca gave orders to the many household slaves charged with
maintaining her employer’s home, attended to the needs of the clerks who
worked in her boss’s store, as well as bearing direct responsibility for
Valentim’s documents. She also appears to have taken care of the enslaved
workers who remained in the General Warehouse pending the resolution of
legal disputes over them, and their masters appear to have paid her for this
task. Just as significantly, Francisca also attended personally to Valentim,
even caring for him when he became ill.
17. “Apelação Cível. Soldadas. Apelante: Damazo da Costa Pacheco”, fo. 89.
18. Ibid., fo. 89, reverse side.
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
11
The difficulties in defining the limits between criada and senhora
(mistress) – in the vocabulary used by the witnesses to describe the ties
between Francisca and Valentim’s household – leave no doubt that she was
essential to the day-to-day functioning of the warehouse, whether as a
dwelling or as a business. Yet, Francisca did not demand her wages as a shop
caixeira, but rather as a personal criada. Because of the evident social
difference between boss and employee, it is unlikely that anyone would
have believed them to be business partners. Francisca herself presented the
fact that she did business at the fringes of the operation of the warehouse
making and selling food as evidence of her boss’s “liberal” nature and not as
proof of her independence. In asking for “payment” as Valentim’s criada,
she used the legal language available to describe a complex relationship. This
relationship involved not only work, but also the intimacy of close coexistence for over two decades and the mutual trust in conducting daily
household and business affairs. Although the justice system did not agree
with her vision of the facts, Francisca nonetheless had no doubt that hers
was a relationship that merited compensation for services rendered.
The cases of the caixeiro Jacintho Almeida and of the criada Francisca de
Azevedo raise numerous questions that cannot be explored in detail here,
but their stories illuminate the contradictory situations that could arise in
places of business and in homes in Rio de Janeiro in the 1830s. The contrast
between the outcomes of these two cases is striking, as are the differences
between what the parties in each case felt they needed to bring to light
before the court. We learn little about the personal relationship between
Almeida and his former boss, since the lawyers in this case only saw fit to
present evidence concerning Almeida’s wages and witnesses’ testimony
about the nature of the two men’s business relations. By contrast, the other
case contains both abundant information concerning the roles that Francisca played in her boss’s life and often contradictory references to the real
or alleged intimacy between her and Valentim. Both Jacintho and Francisca
held central importance in the daily operation of their respective bosses’
homes and businesses, and both held publically recognized responsibilities.
Yet, the ways in which these cases were presented, argued, and adjudicated
could not have been more different.
Jacintho and Francisca fought for their wages, which should have been
paid to them for their work, dedication, and trustworthiness. These two
litigants, however, were confronted with different strategies to deny them
what they sought. Costa, Jacintho Almeida’s boss, attempted to prove that
Jacintho was not just any employee, but rather was someone whose position as an “administrator” imposed responsibilities that were not met.
Therefore, he argued, Jacintho was not owed wages. Unable to prove his
accusations, Costa was obliged to pay the wages due to Almeida. Francisca
was met with entirely different arguments to counter her demands: she was
forced to defend her position within her boss’s home against attacks that
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12
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
called into question her morality. Her boss’s trust in her ability to carry out
her tasks, instead of having served as proof of her qualities as a worker, were
used to attest to the type of intimacy that was judged incompatible with
remunerated labor. In a slave society in which subaltern work was powerfully racialized, even Francisca’s skin color was used as evidence against her;
her “whiteness” indicated that she was not sufficiently subaltern to have
been considered a paid domestic worker. As a laborer, Francisca was disqualified from being Valentim’s business partner or his employee; as a
woman, her connection with the household had not been formalized by
marriage. Thus, the only possible place left for her in Valentim’s home was
that of a concubine, a position that neither conferred any rights on her
except the generosity of her protector, nor gave her any grounds for
demanding compensation as a “true” criada.
T H E A R B I T R A R I N E S S O F T H E L AW A N D V U L N E R A B I L I T Y:
HOW CAN ONE PROVE LABOR?
The legal actions described here so far were initiated at the beginning of the
1830s, a decade that witnessed the consolidation of political and legal institutions that formed the contours of the monarchy in post-independence
Brazil. Among the legal transformations during the period after the passing of
a constitution that was considered to be liberal (1824), Brazil also passed the
first of a series of laws aimed at making the Atlantic slave trade illegal in 1831,
as well as the promulgation of the Criminal Code (1830) and the Code of
Criminal Procedure (1832). More specific legislation was introduced establishing the legal basis for labor contracts for free urban and rural workers in
1830 and 1837. These laws regulating “service rental” were, above all, motivated by the widespread anxiety among planters, still profoundly dependent
on slavery, about the supply of available farm labor. It is no coincidence that,
in the 1830s, the number of immigrants also increased exponentially, especially
those coming from Portugal, who established themselves not only in rural
areas, but above all in Brazil’s major cities, where they had to compete with
and find a space among other poor, free, or freed workers.19
These transformations in the legal context only partially affected the
labor disputes discussed here. These laws had no measureable effect on the
proximity and, indeed, the overlapping nature of caixeiros’ and criadas’
work; nor did these codes and statutes passed in the 1830s and 1840s,
mitigate the ambiguity that marked caixeiros’ and criadas’ laboring lives,
19. Beatriz Mamigonian, “Revisitando a ‘transição para o trabalho livre’. A experiência dos
africanos livres”, in Manolo Florentino (ed.), Tráfico, Cativeiro e Liberdade. Rio de Janeiro,
Séculos XVII–XIX (Rio de Janeiro, 2005), pp. 389–417; Michael Hall and Verena Stolcke, “The
Introduction of Free Labour on São Paulo Coffee Plantations”, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 10
(1983), pp. 170–200; Joseli Mendonça, “Sobre cadeias e coerção. Experiências de trabalho no
Centro-Sul do Brasil do século XIX”, Revista Brasileira de História, 32 (2012), pp. 45–60.
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
13
Figure 2. This plate, entitled “Slave Market” was originally painted by the British officer Henry
Chamberlain (1796–1843), who visited Rio de Janeiro in 1819 and 1820. It depicts the
surroundings of the Valongo, the famous docks were the Africans who survived the Middle
Passage were sold in the markets as slaves. Around the commercial area of the Valongo and
Rio’s waterfront, many of the stories discussed in this article unfolded. Chamberlain’s
description reads: “The Plate represents an elderly Brazilian examining the Teeth of a Negress
previous to purchase, whilst the Dealer, a Cigano, is vehemently exercising his oratory in praise
of her perfections. The Woman looking on is the Purchaser’s Servant Maid, who is most
frequently consulted on such occasions.”
Views and Costumes of the City and Neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from Drawings
taken by Lieutenant Chamberlain, Royal Artillery, during the years 1819 and 1820, with
descriptive explanations (London, 1822).
which had for centuries been codified in the Philippine Ordinances still
being cited in the cases examined in this article. The Ordinances established
the conditions under which one could request wages for services rendered
as a criado, a generic category that could have included caixeiros.20 The legal
uncertainty about how to treat these categories of workers persisted
throughout much of the nineteenth century, even with the restructuring of
the legal institutions and paradigms that shaped the administration of justice
in post-independence Brazil. In the three versions of the laws promulgated
20. “Título XXIX. Do criado, que vive com o senhor a bemfazer, e como se lhe pagará o serviço”
and “Título XXXI. Como se pagarão os serviços e soldadas dos criados, que não entraram a
partido certo”, in Ordenações Filipinas, Livro IV, pp. 807 and 808–810.
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14
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
to regulate the “service rental contracts” (contratos de locação de serviços)
for free persons, passed in 1830, 1837, and 1879, there were no references
either to the work of caixeiros or of criados.21 This interest in regulation
was, above all, the product of anxieties about the labor supply and was part
of the process of seeking alternatives to slave labor. The continuity of
Brazil’s socioeconomic system that depended on captive labor was under
threat due to the attempts to abolish the Atlantic slave trade (which had
been legally challenged since 1831, until it was finally abolished in 1850)22
and to widespread expectations that slavery was about to end (which would
only occur in 1888). Initially conceived in the context of this substitution of
free for enslaved labor, above all on farms, the laws regulating “service
rental” ended up indirectly providing a legal horizon that was also applicable, theoretically, to urban labor, even though the legislation did not touch
on wage labor relations that potentially involved caixeiros or criadas.
It was not, however, the letter of the law that decided on the duties, rights,
and limitations that applied to caixeiros and criadas, but rather, social and
legal practices influenced the decisions and the differential results that each
legal case produced. One can argue that this legal ambiguity implied that
judicial cases involving unpaid wages proceeded in a particularly arbitrary
manner, especially those whose results might have been influenced –
directly or indirectly – by the litigants’ gender, skin color, or nationality.
Another example of this legal ambiguity put into practice can be found in
a case initiated in the Third Civil District (3ª Vara Cível) of Rio de Janeiro in
1842. On 25 May of that year, the lawyer Antonio Carneiro da Cunha, as
legal representative of Francisca do Sacramento, filed a complaint
demanding the payment of wages for work that had been carried out but
never remunerated.23 By way of her attorney, Francisca affirmed that on
1 September 1823 she had moved into the small grocery store (casa de
quitanda) that José da Silva had established that year on a square called the
Largo de Santa Rita, to “serve him receiving a salary of ten thousand per
month”. She continued working for Silva until his death on 2 April 1842.
According to Francisca, in the nearly nineteen years during which she had
worked in that house, she had never received “even one single real in
wages” and Silva had died without having settled his debt to her.
21. The law of 13 September, 1830, which regulates written contracts of labor leasing made by
Brazilians and foreigners, within or beyond the Brazilian Empire, Law no. 108, from 11 October
1837, and Decreto n. 2827, from 15 March, 1879. Cf. Henrique Espada Lima, “Trabalho e Lei para
os Libertos na Ilha de Santa Catarina no Século XIX. Arranjos e contratos entre a autonomia e a
domesticidade”, Cadernos AEL, 14 (2010), pp. 135–75.
22. For the most recent and thorough treatment of this topic, see: Beatriz G. Mamigonian,
Africanos Livres. A abolição do tráfico de escravos no Brasil (São Paulo, 2017).
23. “Apelação Cível. Apelante: José de Moraes Silva, curador a herança jacente do finado José
João da Silva. Apelada: Francisca Maria do Sacramento, 1842”, ANRJ, Fundo: Tribunal da
Relação do Rio de Janeiro (84), n. 7064, Caixa 374, Galeria C, fo. 1 and the following pages.
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
15
Both José and Francisca were identified as “freed blacks” (pretos forros),
indicating their past as enslaved persons. Three witnesses were called for
Francisca to testify about the nature of her professional relations with Silva.
Summoned to speak of Francisca’s honesty, the witnesses described her in
the following manner: a “rustic black woman, very hardworking and
God-fearing [...] incapable of asking for what is not rightly hers”. No one
came forward to contest these witnesses’ accounts of Francisca’s character,
and through them we can understand something about the importance of
Francisca’s work for her boss’s business.24 The testimony reveals that, from
1835 on, Francisca also worked in another business that Silva opened on the
same street, the Rua do Valongo, which sold roasted coffee beans. This was
a lucrative operation, and all of the witnesses in this case attributed Silva’s
financial success to this new business. According to Joaquim de Seixas, a
forty-eight-year-old artisan who lived in the center of the city on the Rua do
Sabão, Francisca’s work involved activities inside the two places, but in this
second store in Valongo, she “also occupied herself doing manual labor in
addition to working in the kitchen, due to the fact that the most important
part of this store was the sale of roasted coffee, which, because of the
excellent way in which it was prepared, was in high demand among
buyers”, and it was, in fact, Francisca “who ground the coffee as well as
operating the roaster, with whose business the late owner [Silva] had
acquired a sufficient livelihood, and in fact a real fortune”. Another witness,
Xavier de Oliveira, was a man of more than fifty years of age of African
descent but born in Rio de Janeiro, who sustained himself by working for
the Ordem Terceira de São Domingos, a Catholic religious order. Oliveira
confirmed that Francisca do Sacramento had worked as a caixeira, also
“carrying out all types of work inside the house” where she lived and
“rented” out her services and, above all, had worked on the Rua do Valongo
“where she was continually grinding roasted coffee”. Finally, José da Fonseca, a twenty-eight-year-old white man and a business owner and neighbor
of Silva’s with whom he was said to have made “commercial deals”, recalled
that six years earlier he had asked the late Silva why he had not purchased a
slave, “given the great amount of work he always required”. According to
Fonseca, Silva’s response was that he “had rented [Francisca] for a long
time, and that it made the most business sense to have her as such, rather
than to buy a slave and run the risk of losing her, and that in addition to that
he was very used to the work that she did”. At least implicitly, all of the
witnesses appear to corroborate the statement that had been made in her
petition to the court: “everything that [the late Silva] had acquired in his
life” had been “at the cost” of Francisca’s labor.
24. The testimony analyzed here can be found between pages 17 and 20 (reverse side) of the
appelate case. Cf. “Apelação Cível. Apelante: José de Moraes Silva”.
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16
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
The trustee appointed by the court to oversee the distribution of the
freedman José da Silva’s inheritance did not call any witnesses to contest the
facts presented by Francisca do Sacramento. Indeed, he even resisted
responding to the official summons calling for arbitration to determine her
wages, only asking his attorney, Caetano Alberto Soares, briefly to contest
the validity of the entire procedure. Soares wrote his response to this request
directly on the pages of the official court documents, in which he delegitimized Francisca’s demand, saying that she had not “proven any one of the
points in her lawsuit”: neither the time that she had served, nor the price that
she had arranged, nor even whether she had, in fact, performed any service
for him at all. Once again, to build his case, Soares drew on the articles in the
Philippine Ordinances that dealt with the conditions for paying criados.25
With no written contract, and with nothing written in Silva’s will that might
confirm his debt to Francisca, Soares did not even bother to call the witnesses’ validity into question, simply requesting that the court “not allow the
estate to be held in abeyance” – in other words, that the court prevent the late
Silva’s property from becoming available to creditors.26
The lower court judge deciding this case summoned appraisers to arbitrate the wages owed to Francisca do Sacramento, and both agreed on a
requested monthly sum of 10$000 réis, a modest amount of money. In his
written decision, the judge affirmed that the facts presented by the witnesses
had proven the case, awarding her a total of two contos and 230$,000 réis.
The trustee of the estate, however, appealed the case to the Tribunal da
Relação do Rio de Janeiro, where the appellate court judge (desembargador)
Francisco de Campos overturned the decision. Campos considered the
entire case, in his words, as “irremediable invalidity”, since it had not been
sent to the Juizado de Órfãos, the special court dedicated to the adjudication
of family matters, and, according to this judge, the appropriate forum for
disputes concerning post-mortem property inventories. Judging null and
void the entire case because of this technicality, he ordered Francisca to pay
the costs of the judicial procedings.27
We know no further details of this story other than those found in the
petition that was submitted to the court in Francisca do Sacramento’s name.
The outcome here was similar to that suffered by other poor women who
tried their luck in court requesting the unpaid wages that they had earned as
criadas. Like Francisca, other women not only had their pleas denied, but
also had to shoulder the financial burden of having dared to bring their cases
to court and being ordered to pay the costs of their court proceedings.28
Gender and skin color certainly played a role in these cases, although these
25.
26.
27.
28.
See particularly the aforementioned Títulos XXIX–XXXV, in Ordenações Filipinas, Livro IV.
“Apelação Cível. Apelante: José de Moraes Silva”, fos 23–24.
Ibid., fo. 47.
For more cases and their outcomes, see Lima, Wages of Intimacy, pp. 11-29.
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
17
factors do not appear explicitly in the official court documents. Francisca’s
vulnerability becomes visible, however, as this case unfolds. First, it is
revealed in the basic fact of her subaltern position. Multiple witnesses’
descriptions of Francisca as a “rustic” and uncultured woman, although
uttered with discernable tones of condescension and undoubtedly colored
with class and racial prejudice, allow us a glimpse of her genuine state of
destitution. Second, it is apparent in the difficulties she experienced in trying
to represent herself legally; as a woman, as a freedperson, and as someone
who was illiterate, any access she had to the law depended on such male
intermediaries as Manoel Pereira, the solicitor (solicitador de causas) whom
she initially sought out to bring her case to court, or Antônio Carneiro da
Cunha, the modest attorney who unsuccessfully presented her case to the
appellate judge. Neither of these men showed themselves able to confront
the opponent representing the other side of this case, Doutor Caetano
Alberto Soares, a distinguished member of the capital city’s judicial elite.
The following year, Soares would be one of the founders of the Brazilian
Institute of Lawyers, an important national professional organization.29
Caixeira was how Francisca do Sacramento’s witnesses described the
position that she occupied in João José da Silva’s store. Under this label,
however, fell an extensive set of responsibilities that included the care of Silva’s
home and his store, a range of kitchen duties, and other forms of “manual
labor”, menial tasks that under other circumstances at least one witness considered could have been carried out by a domestic slave. This description of
her role as a caixeira effectively erases the limits between household tasks, on
the one hand, and those to be carried out in public on the other: in other
words, the limits between the supposedly reproductive activities carried out in
the domestic sphere and the productive, commercial activities that defined the
operation of a small coffee roasting and sales business.
NEITHER CAIXEIRA, NOR CRIADA: THE LEGAL LIMBO
OF FEMALE LABOR
Payment agreements that went unfulfilled provided both male and female
workers with the rare opportunity to express to judicial authorities their
expectations about how their labor should be treated and remunerated. In a
world where the notion of work as a source of specific rights had yet to take
root, these judicial conflicts raised expectations about rights that the law, in
general, rarely even contemplated.
29. The Instituto dos Advogados Brasileiros (IAB) was founded in 1843 and was one of the most
important juridical institutions during the Empire. For a historical analysis of this institution, see
Eduardo Pena, Pajens da Casa Imperial. Jurisconsultos e escravidão e a Lei de 1871 (Campinas,
2001). The participation of Caetano Soares in the founding of the IAB is registered in the Gazeta
dos Tribunaes, 1:58, 18 August (1843), p. 4.
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18
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
As the cases that this article has presented so far demonstrate, despite the
existence of a few juridical positions taken concerning caixeiros and of laws
governing “service rental”, the juridical language employed in disputes over
the wages of caixeiros and criadas still came exclusively from the centuriesold “Philippine” Luso-Brazilian body of laws.
The great legal innovation that had the potential to change this situation was
the Commercial Code of the Empire (Código Comercial do Império), which
became law in June 1850.30 This code established the legal parameters for the
exercise of commercial activity in the country. The Commercial Code did not
directly address the conditions of wage laborers, but, in its article 226, it
defined a broad range of commercial leasing, which included the rental of
“something” or of a person’s labor, for a specific amount of time and price.
Thus, what this law covered was piecework and not, properly speaking, wage
labor. In November of that same year, however, the introduction of the
Procedural Commercial Code included, within the realm of commercial law,
“questions concerning the setting of payments, and of wages, rights, obligations, [and] responsibilities of auxiliary commercial agents”.31 Thus, at least
theoretically, disputes involving caixeiros who, to the degree that their
“persons and acts” could be defined as strictly commercial, now fell within the
purview of Brazilian national commercial law.
The legal foundation of labor contracts in general, and above all those in
Brazil, remained the object of controversy, as a query made by the Emperor
to the Justice Section of the Council of State in 1860 suggests.32 In their
officially published response to the question about which legislation was in
force to regulate the work performed by Brazilian (as opposed to immigrant) laborers, the Council pointed to the Commercial Code of the
Empire. Domestic labor was, however, explicitly left out.33
There is no doubt that the passing of the Code intensified the distinction
between the work of caixeiros and that of other types of workers before the law.
30. Low no. 556, from 25 June 1850. See: Código Commercial do Império do Brasil. Annotado
com toda a legislação que lhe é referente [...], pelo bacharel Salustianno Orlando de Araujo Costa,
3rd edn (Rio de Janeiro, 1878).
31. See article 14, second paragraph of Decreto no. 737, 25 November 1850, “Determina a ordem
do Juizo no Processo Commercial”, Collecção de Leis do Império do Brazil, Tomo XIII, Parte II,
1850 (Rio de Janeiro, 1851), pp. 271–370, 273.
32. The Council of State (Conselho de Estado) was an institution introduced by the 1824 Brazilian
Constitution after Independence and survived until the end of the regime, in 1889. Composed by
notable polititians and jurists chosen by the Emperor, the function of the Conselho was to advise
the monarch on political and administrative issues, as well as on diplomacy and the interpretation
of the law. On the Conselho de Estado see Maria F. Martins, “A Velha Arte de Governar:
o Conselho de Estado no Brasil Imperial”, Topoi, 7:12 (2006), pp. 178–221.
33. Henrique Espada Lima, “Trabalho e Lei para os Libertos na Ilha de Santa Catarina no Século
XIX. Arranjos e contratos entre a autonomia e a domesticidade”, Cadernos AEL, 14 (2010), pp.
135–175, 149.
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
19
The Code required that “owners of businesses in any kind of commerce”,
maintain “uniform order in accounting and bookkeeping, and have books for
these necessary purposes”.34 This provision accentuated the formalization of
caixeiros’ labor arrangements, to the extent that it was expected that wages and
money paid and owed would be registered in the accounting books. Thus, the
Commercial Code had the effect of reinforcing the contractual character of
labor relations in wholesale and retail stores, favoring formalized relations to the
detriment of the informal and sometimes familial arrangements that were so
common both in domestic labor and in the relationships between bosses and
their apprentices in commercial establishments.
Once again, the letter of the law did not directly discriminate with respect
to the sex of the workers, and it would, at least in theory, have been possible
to imagine the existence of women in the ranks of the caixeiros. Yet, as the
cases of Francisca de Azevedo and Francisca do Sacramento in the preceding decades already signaled, it was not so easy to establish clear
boundaries between the work assigned to criados and that of caixeiros,
much less in the case of a woman. And for those women whose work was
simultaneously domestic and commercial, the difficulty of proving an
employment relationship shows that theirs was a type of domesticity that
the law and its agents failed to recognize as a source of rights.
Thus, it is not surprising that, after 1850, all of the judicial cases in Rio de
Janeiro that included the demand for the payment of wages on the part of
caixeiros, who were invariably male, were only heard in the Commercial
Court. Similar demands for wages made by women presenting themselves
as criadas, for their part, were still directed to the Civil Court Judge (Juízo
Civil), a jurisdiction that continued to function according to a body of laws
that remained contaminated by the same legal ambiguity which had characterized the earlier decades. The last case we will analyze powerfully
reveals how the legal ambiguities confronted by women who worked in
homes and commercial establishments persisted in the following decades,
a period marked by major socio-political transformations.
In May 1878, by way of a solicitor named Antônio Carvalho Guimarães,
Anna Maria de Jesus presented a petition to the Judge of the First Civil
District of Rio de Janeiro, to force her former boss, José Gonçalves Maia, to
pay a debt of back pay she said was owed to her.35 Anna affirmed that she
had been José Maia’s criada since October 1870, when she was invited to
live and work as a servant in his home in Rio’s Santa Teresa neighborhood,
where he also operated a small tavern in the same building. She worked
there until 14 February 1878 when, dissatisfied with her job, she decided to
34. Código Commercial do Império do Brazil, Capítulo II, art. 10, p. 11.
35. “Apelação Cível. 10 Apelante: José Joaquim Gonçalves Maia Apelante: Anna Maria de Jesus,
1879”, ANRJ Fundo: Tribunal da Relação do Rio de Janeiro (84), n. 2587, Caixa 157, Galeria C,
fo. 4 and the ones to follow. All subsequent references to this case come from this file.
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20
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
collect the money owed to her. Anna affirmed that, in the seven years during
which she had worked for José, he had never paid her any wages, which she
calculated as amounting to a sum of 30$000 réis per month.
In the year in which she brought her case to court, Anna was fifty-two
years old and José was thirty-two. Both were Portuguese immigrants of
limited means, who had gone to Rio de Janeiro to make a life for themselves.
José Maia, following the example of the many other young immigrants
who were his compatriots, was a subaltern caixeiro working for other
Portuguese shopkeepers before he was able to save enough money to
acquire an establishment of his own. Anna worked as a wage-earning maid
in a familial household. Once José had accumulated enough money to buy
what the archival documents describe as an “insignificant tavern”, he invited
Anna to join him there. Despite the modest accommodation – the structure
was no more than a “shack made of wooden slabs and zinc” – Anna accepted
the offer, perhaps seeing it as an opportunity to have a more independent life
and work arrangement. At a certain moment during this period, Anna not
only worked in his home and his tavern, but she also shared “a common
bed” with José. From the moment when they began to live together, despite
their obvious proximity, the parallel lives of these two Portuguese immigrants began to diverge in important respects. José Maia had opened his
business as a small tavern, but a few years later he was able to acquire another
similar establishment, in addition to other real estate in the Santa Teresa
neighborhood. And in May 1878, José got married, but not to Anna. By
then, he had trodden the well-worn path traveled by many young Portuguese immigrants in Rio de Janeiro: ascending the social ladder by working
in petty commerce, going from being caixeiro to being a boss.
While living under the same roof as José, however, Anna’s life took a
different turn. The various witnesses in this legal case agreed that her work
had extended to all aspects of José Maia’s life and business: she performed
housekeeping tasks and cooked, as well as washing and ironing his clothes
and those of his shop employees. In his taverns, she cooked, carried firewood, and made deliveries, and she sometimes oversaw the work of his
caixeiros. Finally, she also raised animals on a small scale and provided
services for other people, cleaning, cooking, and taking care of clothing for
young, unmarried men, and in this manner she was able to put aside some
extra money. The more José prospered, the more intense Anna’s workload
became. When she decided to leave José’s home, the man for whom she was,
in her own words, a criada, her decision was based on the excessive work,
which was ruining her health. She was, she said, “disgusted” with the excess
of tasks for which she was responsible, and she resented José’s decision to
marry. At the time she presented her case, she had fallen ill and was interned
in the Hospital da Ordem do Carmo, a charity hospital that was part of a
Catholic religious order with which she was associated. She did not appear
to have many resources and, in addition to the wages she never received, she
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
21
also demanded that José Maia return the money she had loaned to him –
money that she had been able to save from earnings from her work
“outside”.
The dispute around this case was intense, carrying it to the appellate
court. Although she did not deny her sexual relationship with José
during the time when she worked in his home, Anna argued that her
recognized personal sacrifice from when she worked in both his home
and his businesses had conferred on her certain rights, which had not
been respected. Although she had labored without making a previous
arrangement for receiving wages, she was convinced that her efforts merited
compensation since, in her lawyer’s words, “to work without pay is
against justice”. But the response from José Maia and his lawyers contested
the logic of the entire case, which, they said, was “unproven” and
groundless and constituted a “false, imaginary, and impertinent story”. The
nature of the relationship between José and Anna was at the center of
the argument:
Because the plaintiff and the defendant cohabited, she as his lover, [...]; she gave
orders to his caixeiros, raised chickens, sold eggs, washed and pressed clothes,
provided food for his customers, [...], but all of this on her own account and
without the defendant having received for himself any payment for these small
jobs – she did not carry out, in the end, the work of a paid criada for the defendant
but rather only those [tasks] compatible with communion between her and the
defendant, compensated for with a roof over her head, food, friendship, a shared
bed, and caresses.36
José Maia’s formal reply to Anna’s petition to the court left no doubt
about the extent of Anna’s activities and the diligence with which she had
carried them out, or even the fact that on more than one occasion she had
lent José money. What he contested, however, was the significance of these
activities and her description of them as “work” that deserved remuneration.
In the “communion” that constituted a relationship with a concubine, the
question of its morality aside, there was no place for monetary compensation, since it was a voluntary relationship between two parties founded on an
entirely different type of compensation. If Anna actually carried out all of
the activities she described, she had done so out of gratitude for being José’s
“dependent” and his “lover”, compensating him with her work in exchange
for medical treatment and the other forms of care that he provided. Finally,
in another strategy that he used to argue this case, José also tried to delegitimize Anna’s demands by questioning her case’s standing in that court.
Since Anna was a foreign national demanding wages, she should have pursued her case before the Justice of the Peace (Juiz de Paz) and not in the civil
36. “Apelação Cível. 1° Apelante: José Joaquim Gonçalves Maia”, fo. 13. Emphasis in original.
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22
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
court, according to the legal guidelines laid out in legislation passed in 1837,
which dealt with the rental of the services of foreign workers.37
Witnesses on both sides of this case corroborated the extensive range
of tasks that were part of Anna’s work, although the doubt concerning
whether she was in fact a criada or a amásia (lover) appeared, to most of the
parties involved, to be an especially difficult question to resolve. The Judge
of the First Civil District of the city, Caetano Andrade Pinto, analyzed the
case in an exceptionally long, seven-page decision. After carefully describing the arguments one by one, his decision began by contesting the validity
of applying laws that regulate service rental of foreign workers to questions
related to domestic service, affirming his jurisdiction over this case. He
proceeded by stating that he did not see any contradiction between the fact
that the plaintiff in this case was both “the defendant’s lover” and his criada.
Thus, if Anna “performed her own services [...] as a criada and not as a
lover”, she would have the right to compensation for her work, “being
that”, the judge continued, “the law does not recognize the communion
resulting from a romantic relationship as having the civil effect of formal
marriage uniting the couple’s property, and in this latter case [the defendant]
would have to share this joint married property with the plaintiff; not even
the fact of not having agreed upon the price of rental [of her services] takes
away from the plaintiff the right to have her work paid at the price that shall
be [determined by the court].”38
Andrade Pinto only partially awarded Anna what she sought in this case,
taking into account the lack of a written agreement concerning her wages
and the fact that José was poor and “allowed her time to perform other
types of service [outside his home]”. Both parties appealed the decision, and
the case was then brought to the appellate court, the Tribunal da Relação. In
December 1879, after reviewing the case, citing a lack of proof, the judge
Luis Carlos de Paiva Teixeira decided against Anna’s demand for unpaid
wage and, in addition, ordered her to pay the legal costs that the state had
incurred. She unsuccessfully attempted to stay the decision, and the case
was closed.
In light of the cases discussed above that had unfolded in previous
decades, the outcome of this long process of litigation between Anna and
José Maia is not surprising. The lack of a legal framework that made it
37. Idem, fls. 23 and 23 reverse side. Law no. 108, passed on 11 October 1837 specified that the
Justice of the Peace (Juizado de Paz) for the municipality where the renter resides shall be the
jurisdiction where any legal action that came out of service rental contracts for foreigners shall be
brought. See: Joseli Mendonça. “Os Juizes de Paz e o Mercado de Trabalho – Brasil, Século XIX”,
in Gladys S. Ribeiro et al. (eds), Diálogos entre Direito e História. Cidadania e Justiça (Niterói,
2009), pp. 238–255.
38. The sentence is dated 27 August 1879. Cf. “Apelação Cível. 1° Apelante: José Joaquim
Gonçalves Maia”, fls. 92 reverse side and 93.
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
23
possible to recognize unequivocally the labor relationship between these
two people exacerbated the arbitrary nature of the judicial decision for this
case. Once again, personal details concerning both parties abounded
throughout the legal battle, as did the moral debate on the nature of their
relationship. One of the elements of this ambiguity was precisely the difficulty of establishing with any precision which body of laws could provide
the foundation for a judicial decision. The Philippine Ordinances were not
directly cited, nor is there any mention of the Commercial Code. Laws
regulating service rentals are mentioned, but the judges never actually
considered them. In the lower courts, the case was decided favorably for
Anna, but the decision makes no mention of any particular statute. The
basis for the lower-court judge’s decision points toward a contrast that
Brazilian law in the nineteenth century did not recognize: that a concubine
relationship was not the same as a marriage and did not produce the “civil
effect of formal marriage uniting the couple’s property”, and that must
therefore be treated as a work relationship like any other. The appellate
judge disagreed with this interpretation and dismissed the case rather than
even rendering a decision on it.
Women who worked in Rio’s small commercial establishments and
brought lawsuits demanding their unpaid wages only stood a chance of
winning if they could present material evidence. They bore the burden of
proof, a demand that was often impossible to meet. The expectation that a
wage labor relationship could be proven by written documentation was at
the center of these suits. As Brazil experienced a series of legal transformations over the course of the mid-nineteenth century, this expectation
only gained importance in determining the outcome of similar legal
disputes. The Commercial Code was only one of the laws that reinforced
this dependency on written evidence and, therefore, on the public registry
of contracts: a growing demand in commercial and civil relationships, but
one that directly contrasted with the characteristic informality of domestic
labor arrangements of that period.
If we think of these legal cases and their outcomes as indicators of the
place women who labored in private houses and businesses had in
nineteenth-century Brazil’s legal culture of work, we might say that the
invisibility of female labor was its most apparent feature. These women
engaged in extraordinarily difficult legal battles to demonstrate that they
had performed genuine work; these battles mirrored their disputes over the
definition of the real place they occupied in the homes where they lived.
Their ultimately fruitless struggles to defend their personal respectability
effectively rendered invisible both their productive labor and their role in
the economic success of the men for whom they worked. And just as the
value generated by domestic labor was obscured behind a haze of the
legal ambiguity, as we shall see, women and their labor came to occupy a
marginal place in the urban public sphere.
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24
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
Figure 3. This cartoon, drawn by Angelo Agostini (1843–1910), is originally from Revista
Illustrada, a magazine printed by the famous illustrator and publisher in Rio de Janeiro
between 1876 and 1898. The image’s original context is a series of ironic cartoons about the
reaction of Rio’s small business owners to the introduction of a “Consumer’s Cooperative” in
the city. It depicts an everyday scene from inside a small dry goods store: on the left, the shop
owner, very likely Portuguese, ponders the profits that he could have made by using tempered
weights in his shop scales. On the right, a young caixeiro weights some flour or sugar while a
woman drinks a glass of spirit (cachaça). Another patron watches the scene and laughs. She is
wearing a piece of fabric tied around her head in a fashion that was common among
quitandeiras, women of African descent (both free and enslaved) who used to work selling
prepared food and vegetables in the city’s streets. Both pictures repeat common stereotypes
about the habits and mores of Portuguese shop-owners and black women.
Revista Illustrada, Anno I, n. 20, Rio de Janeiro, May 27, 1876. p. 8.
CONCLUSION: DIVERGENT TRAJECTORIES OF
CAIXEIROS AND CRIADAS
The cases explored in this article present eloquent evidence of the trajectories – both interwoven and diverging – of caixeiros and criadas in the
course of the nineteenth century in Rio de Janeiro. Although it would be
impossible to discuss all the dimensions of these cases, we can reflect on
some possible ways to understand this process as connected to the
dynamics of labor relations in Rio, on the one hand, and to national politics
on the other.
First, it is important to note that labor relations were inseparable from the
social and demographic reorganization of the city, above all in the second
half of the century. In the 1850s, with the freeing of capital after the end of
the Atlantic slave trade, business owners began to invest in hiring European
immigrants.39 These were, in general, poor workers, both individuals and
families, who made the journey to Brazil to do farm labor there in the hope
39. Luís Felipe Alencastro, “Proletários e escravos. Imigrantes portugueses e cativos africanos no
Rio de Janeiro, 1850–1872”, Novos Estudos, 21 (1988), pp. 30–56.
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
25
of buying a piece of land and improving their lives. Whereas in other
regions of the country immigrants moved to rural areas, including the
recently created “colonies” that were organized to bring groups of foreign
immigrants to establish agrarian settlements, recently arrived unmarried
Portuguese often settled in the capital city, finding work in petty commerce
or other forms of urban labor. Together with enslaved day laborers and
freedpersons of African descent, these immigrants formed the basis of a
heterogeneous proletariat and a large reserve of available, cheap labor.
In the two subsequent decades, the social and ethnic composition of Rio de
Janeiro changed significantly. According to the census carried out in 1872,
among the city’s population of 274,972 persons, 49,939 were still enslaved.
The number of immigrant inhabitants of the city was 73,311, among them
55,938 Portuguese, of whom over eighty per cent were men. Whereas in 1849
out of every ten inhabitants of Rio only four were considered as white, in
1872, reflecting above all the large influx of Portuguese immigrants and the
sale of many urban slaves into rural labor in the provinces, this proportion was
inverted: for every ten inhabitants of the city, six were white.40
This demographic shift is intertwined with other transformations in the
organization of urban labor. The growing presence of Portuguese immigrants had a direct impact not only on the composition of the male working
class, but also on the female labor market. As the historiography on urban
commerce in Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the nineteenth century shows,
the participation of African and Afro-descended women in retail commerce
and in street vending was quite significant. Once the Atlantic slave trade
definitively ended in 1850, however, this presence diminished markedly,
and workers in commerce came to be recruited, albeit not exclusively,
from the ranks of the city’s young, white men, primarily Portuguese and
Luso-Brazilian men, often hired by their own compatriots.41
The world of domestic labor offers a contrasting image. In 1872, 55,011 of
the city’s workers were occupied in domestic service, of whom 41.52 per
cent were enslaved and 58.47 per cent were free. This occupational category,
the single largest listed in the census, accounted for seventy-two per cent of
the 48,558 female workers in the city of Rio de Janeiro.42 The end of slavery
40. Alencastro, “Vida privada e ordem privada no Império”, p. 30; Luiz Carlos Soares, O ‘Povo
de Cam’ na Capital do Brasil. A Escravidão Urbana no Rio de Janeiro do Século XIX (Rio de
Janeiro, 2007), pp. 376 and 379.
41. Alencastro, “Proletários e Escravos”, p. 41; Faria, “Sinhás Pretas, Damas Mercadoras”,
p. 75; Farias, Mercados Minas, pp. 23–24.
42. Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in
Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Austin, TX, 1992), p. 6 ; Flávia Souza, “Criados ou empregados? Sobre
o trabalho doméstico na cidade do Rio de Janeiro no antes e no depois da abolição da escravidão”,
paper presented at XXVII Simpósio Nacional De História, ANPUH, Natal, July 2013, p. 7,
available at: http://www.snh2013.anpuh.org/resources/anais/27/1371332466_ARQUIVO_Texto_
versaofinal_-FlaviaFernandesdeSouza.pdf; last accessed: 24 September 2017. The “domestic service”
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26
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
reinforced the feminization of domestic labor, because the labor market for
men emerging from captivity gave them more opportunities to escape from
the often oppressive circumstances inherent in domestic work, some of
which this article has examined. With this, emancipated men turned out to
be better positioned than women under the same conditions to strive for
and to attain, however limitedly, those ideals of both freedom and masculine
respectability that entailed the expectation of removing one’s self from the
bonds of personal dependency that were inevitable in domestic labor.43
The gradual exclusion of women, particularly those of African descent,
from commercial occupations in Rio de Janeiro reinforced the place of
domestic labor as a primordial space of work for poor women during this
moment of massive immigration around the time of abolition. Freed
women, who had found more opportunities for gaining access to urban
occupations during earlier periods, appear to have seen these opportunities
diminishing, not only due to competition in the commercial realm as it
became an increasingly masculine and “whitened” space, but also because of
the emergence of models of female respectability that cast negative
judgment on their public sociability and marginalized their independent
labor arrangements.
The difficulty of making a clear distinction between women’s work as
criadas in the private, domestic territory of homes, on the one hand, and as
caixeiras in small businesses on the other, recalls another characteristically
indistinct feature of women’s working lives in nineteenth-century Brazil:
the ambiguities female laborers confronted as women sought their place in
the public sphere of collective politics, the space where people constructed a
“working-class” identity. Through studying the legal cases presented here,
we can draw connections between this private sphere of residential homes
and commercial establishments on the one hand and the public sphere
mediated by an institutionalized justice system on the other. The cases
examined here and others like them allow us to think about how, as they
traversed these two spheres, people constructed and transformed the
relationships between caixeiros and criados and the law, between these types
of workers and political and judicial institutions, and between these and
other types of workers. Thus, through these cases, we can investigate the
category can also be broken down by gender: Among the 20,801 Brazilian-born free workers
occupied in domestic labor, 16,683 were women. Among the free, foreign domestic workers, 7,595
out of a total of 11,367 were women. Of the 22,842 enslaved workers in domestic service, 14,184
were women. See: “Município Neutro. População considerada em relação às
profissões”, in Recenseamento do Brazil Império em 1872 (Rio de Janeiro, 1874).
43. For an analysis of how notions of liberty and citizenship interacted with ideas about gender,
see Diana Paton and Pamela Scully, “Introduction: Gender and Slave Emancipation in Comparative Perspective”, in Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (eds), Gender and Slave Emancipation in
the Atlantic World (Durham, NC, 2005), pp. 1–37.
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
27
process through which certain categories of workers managed to distinguish themselves from the rest, mobilizing the meaning of respectability
and citizenship and fighting for political and social rights.
The Brazilian Constitution passed in 1824, two years after independence
had established the right to vote as a constituent element of male citizenship.
All male “Brazilian citizens in enjoying their political rights” and “naturalized foreigners” could vote and run for public office, as long as they met
the minimum income requirements. Even male former slaves could vote in
local elections, as long as they were Brazilian-born and fulfilled the rather
restrictive income requirements. The Constitution excluded from the electorate not only non-citizens (foreigners and slaves), but also women, minors,
and criados de servir (a disenfranchised category of criados that explicitly
excluded the more respected primeiros-caixeiros and guarda-livros or
bookkeepers).44 Yet, in contrast with criados and male freedpersons, and
even male foreigners who could acquire at least some of the attributes
of male citizenship, being a woman was an insuperable barrier to active
citizenship for maids, women shop workers, and elite women alike. Thus, it
is not surprising that this gender distinction played a fundamental role when
caixeiros and criadas tried to find or to transform the place they occupied in
the political world as well as public recognition of their work.
From the 1870s on, caixeiros’ struggles for regulation of the operating
hours of commercial establishments, as well as the articulation of these
struggles with both the republican and the workers’ movements to abolish
slavery, turned on these workers’ efforts to distinguish themselves from the
indistinct universe of servile labor that brought them closer to criados and
domestic maids.45 The personal and collective affirmation of the dignity of
work and of the “clerking” class – a classe caixeiral – expressed itself in the
language of male citizenship and public rights, distancing themselves from
the subaltern (and emasculating) character of personal servitude and
domesticity. These gendered and class dynamics fueled the divergent
trajectories of caixeiros and criadas and made this divergence into an
entrenched reality.
Meanwhile, in the final decade of slavery and the years immediately after
abolition in 1888, municipal authorities became especially interested in
regulating and controlling domestic work. The government proposed
legislation that attempted to establish a caderneta, a logbook in which to
register labor contracts and the professional histories of domestic criadas
44. “Art. 92”, Constituição Política do Império do Brasil (de 25 de março de 1824), available at:
http://www.planalt.gov.br/ccivil_03/Constituicao/Constituicao24.htm; last
accessed: 24
September 2017.
45. Cf. Fabiane Popinigis, “‘Todas as liberdades são irmãs’. Os caixeiros e as lutas dos trabalhadores por direitos entre o Império e a República”, Revista Estudos Históricos, 29:59 (2016),
pp. 647–666.
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28
Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
and criados, under the control of the police. Once these regulations were
finally approved in the early 1890s, their enforcement met with resistance
from the very group for which the law had been passed, and it was never
implemented.46 Municipal power thus functioned in strikingly different
ways for these two types of workers. For caixeiros, the proposals for regulation came out of their political intervention and from the pressure they
exerted on legislators and other public authorities. In contrast, the various
proposals presented in the Municipal Chamber, the local governing body, in
the course of the 1880s to regulate criados of both sexes, resulted from
legislators’ concerns about the need to control this mass of workers who,
soon to be removed from any of the ties that bound them to slavery, continued to occupy domestic spaces and, dangerously, to share the intimacy of
their bosses. In their various versions, however, legislative bills that aimed
to regulate domestic service managed to displease both employers and
workers. The employers because they objected to the interference of public
authorities in private business (who to hire to work in one’s own home, and
how) and they opposed the limitations on their freedom to hire. The
workers because they saw it as an attempt to control them and limit their
freedom in general, subjecting them to the strict vigilance of the police
authorities and uncomfortably reminding them of the final years of slavery.
José do Patrocínio and Machado de Assis, two of the era’s most important
commentators and both Afro-Brazilian, had telling reactions to the laws
governing these prevalent forms of urban labor. The important abolitionist
politician José do Patrocínio (1853–1905), writing about a proposal to
regulate the service of criados, affirmed that it was a “new law of
dissimulated slavery”, and for that reason was rejected by “public opinion”. 47
For his part, in the same year and just months after the abolition of slavery, the
renowned writer Machado de Assis (1839–1908) argued that “all liberties are
siblings” in voicing his support for a movement by caixeiros to pass legislation
that regulated the working hours in commerce.48
Thus, as we have sought to demonstrate in this article, female domestic
workers’ aspirations for citizenship and for public recognition of their work
ran aground in the emerging definition of male citizenship, which stood in
explicit contrast to domesticity. Public space and politics actively excluded
women, whose difficulty in having their labor valued and their rights
recognized in the public and legal spheres both antedated and resulted from
this exclusion.
46. Graham, House and Street, p. 123; Souza, “Criados ou empregados”, p. 9.
47. Flávia Fernandes de Souza, “‘Entre nós, nunca se cogitou de uma tal necessidade’. O poder
municipal da Capital e o projeto de regulamentação do serviço doméstico de 1888”, Revista do
Arquivo Geral da Cidade, 5 (2011), pp. 29–48, 37.
48. Popinigis, “Todas as liberdades são irmãs”, p. 658.
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Maids, Clerks, and Rio’s Labor Relations
29
At the end of the nineteenth century, caixeiros made up a respectable part
of the urban working class of Rio de Janeiro, organized in associations and
capable of having their demands for improved working conditions recognized by municipal authorities and in legislation. In contrast, during the
same period, the professional reality of female domestic workers looked
very different: placed at the margin of the organized working class, confined
to labor arrangements marked by domesticity and paternalism, the law only
saw them as objects of political and sanitary regulation, with little or no
recognition of any direct link to their condition as workers.
Translation: Amy Chazkel
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