Marriage choices in a plantation society: Bahia, Brazil

International Review of Social History

Volumn 50, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 25-41

  Holt, Katherine ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 29344475269     PISSN: 00208590     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020859005002051     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. On the region's economic and social base, see Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (New York, 1985),
2. B.J. Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780-1860 (Stanford, CA, 1998);
3. and Arlene Díaz and Jeff Stewart, "Occupational Class and Female-Headed Households in Santiago Maior do Iguape, Brazil, 1835", Journal of Family History, 16 (1991), pp. 299-313.
4. Eni de Mesquita Samara, A família brasileira (São Paulo, 1983);
5. Dain Borges, The Family in Bahia, Brazil, 1870-1945 (Stanford, CA, 1992);
6. Mariza Corrêa, "Repensando a família patriarcal brasileira", Cadernos de Pesquisa, 37 (1981), pp. 5-16;
7. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, "Sexual Politics, Race, and Bastard-Bearing in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: A Question of Culture or Power?", Journal of Family History, 16 (1991), pp. 241-260;
8. Donald Ramos, "Single and Married Women in Vila Rica, Brazil, 17 54-1838", Journal of Family History, 16 (1991), pp. 261-282.
9. B.J. Barickman, "Revisiting the Casa-Grande: Plantation and Cane Farming Households in Early Nineteenth-Century Bahia", Hispanic American Historical Review, 84 (2004), pp. 619-661.
10. I define patriarchy as a hierarchal relationship of power that privileges masculinity and age. It is not limited to men, as women can borrow its privileges and act patriarchally, but it implies an assumption of masculine prerogatives and activities. The exercise of this type of power often involves the formulation of a large household with a married man presiding over children, agregados, and slaves, but my use of "patriarchal" as a relationship of power does not mean that all who acted patriarchally necessarily lived in households of this type.
11. José Lino Coutinho, Cartas sobre a educação de Cora (Salvador, 1849), Carta XXX, p. 107.
12. Linda Lewin's exhaustive study of Brazilian marriage and inheritance law argues that "by declining to facilitate access to the sacrament of matrimony, through simplified procedures and lower fees, the church insured that mancebia [consensual unions] would thrive";
13. Lewin, Surprise Heirs (Stanford, CA, 2003): vol. 2, p. 87.
14. A survey of all marriages recorded at five-year intervals found that 7.5 per cent of free marriages required dispensations for consanguinity and 3.9 per cent for "illicit affinity";
15. Family History Center, Princeton (FHC), Livros de matrimonies, Santiago do Iguape, 1774-1805; 1806-1857; 1857-1902.
16. Linda Lewin, "Natural and Spurious Children in Brazilian Inheritance Law from Colony to Empire: A Methodological Essay", Americas, 48 (1992), pp. 351-396.
17. George Gardener, Travels in the Interior of Brazil (New York, 1970 [1846]), p. 14.
18. Marriage of Manoel Paulo dos Santos and Eusebia Maria (27 September 1845) Santiago do Iguape.
19. FHC, Livros de matrimonios, Santiago do Iguape, 1806-1847, P. 164.
20. Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil (Carbondale, IL, 1966 [1817]), p. 175.
21. I would like to thank Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof for her helpful comments on my use of these categories at the 2004 Latin American Studies Association Conference.
22. Katia M. de Queirós Mattoso, "Slave, Free, and Freed Family Structures in Nineteenth-Century Salvador, Bahia", Luso-Brazilian Review, 25 (1988), pp. 69-84. Mattoso calculated that 53 percent of free couples in 1855 Salvador were living in consensual unions.
23. Koster, Travels in Brazil, p. 175.
24. Sebastião Monteiro da Vide, Constituições Primeiras do Arcebispado da Bahia (São Paulo, 1853 [1719]), Livro I, Titulo LXXI, no. 303.
25. Carlos Augusto Taunay, Manual do agricultor brasileiro (São Paulo, 2001 [1830]), 78.
26. Recent works on slave families in Brazil include Robert Slenes, Na senzala, uma flor: esperanças e recordações na formação da família escrava (Rio dc Janeiro, 1999);
27. Isabel Cristina Ferreira dos Reis, Histórias de vida familiar e afetiva de escravos na Bahia do século XIX (Salvador, 2001);
28. Anna Gicelle García Alaniz, Ingênuos e libertos: estratégias de sobrevivência familiar em épocas de transição, 1871 -1895 (Campinas, São Paulo, 1997);
29. and Tarcísio Rodrigues Botelho, "Famílias e escravarias; demografia e família escrava no none de Minas Gerais no século XIX", População e família, 1 (1998), pp. 211-234.
30. For a detailed study of a slave woman who eschewed marriage despite her owner's initial insistence, see Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No (Cambridge, 2002).
31. See for example Michael Tadman, "The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas", American Historical Review, 105 (2000), pp. 1534-1575.
32. See Table 6.
33. FHC, Livros de matrimonios, Santiago do Iguape, 1774-1805; 1806-1857; 1857-1902. Sample of every five years from 1800-1885; 1820 and 1825 could not be found.
34. Livros de matrimonios 1774-1805 Ibid.
35. Alida Metcalf's study of a coffee plantation in Santana de Parnaíba Brazil in 1820 found that 94 per cent of slave marriages occurred between two slaves owned by the same master;
36. Metcalf, "Searching for the Slave Family in Colonial Brazil: A Reconstruction from São Paulo", Journal of Family History, 16 (1991), pp. 283-297
37. Linda Wimmer's study of tobacco cultivation in eighteenth-century Bahia found 98 per cent of slave marriages between slaves held by the same owner; Wimmer, "Ethnicity and Family Formation among Slaves on Tobacco Farms in the Bahian Recôncavo, 1698-1820", in José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (eds), Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa, and Brazil during the Era of Slavery (Amherst, NY, 2004), pp. 149-162
38. . Also, Emily West, "The Debate on the Strength of Slave Families: South Carolina and the Importance of Cross-Plantation Marriages", Journal of American Studies, 33 (1999), pp. 221-241;
39. B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore, MD, 1984), p. 370
40. I decided to use a sample from several nearby sugar parishes because the 1872 figures provided for Santiago do Iguape seem unreliable. For example, in the printed census for Iguape, the number of ever-married branco men was higher than the entire adult male branco population. It seems very unlikely that every branco man over age sixteen in the parish, as well as some even younger men, had legally married. Men rarely married before their mid-twenties. Second, Iguape's number of free ever-married (1,578) men outnumbered the free ever-married women (728) by more than two to one.
41. e siècle" (Ph.D., Université de Paris X Nanterre, 1975), p. 252.
42. On the cholera epidemic, see Donald B. Cooper, "The New 'Black Death': Cholera in Brazil, 1855-56", Social Science History, 10 (1986), pp. 467-488
43. . 25. Miguel Calmon du Pin e Almeida, Ensaio sobre o fabrico do açúcar (Salvador, 2002 [1834]), p. 60.
44. Sheila de Castro Faria, "Família escrava e legitimidade: estratégias de preservação da autonomia", Estudos afro-asiźticos, 23 (1992), pp. 113-131.
45. Gardener, Travels in the Interior of Brazil, p. 14.