House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro - Softcover

Lauderdale Graham, Sandra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0292727577 ISBN 13: 9780292727571

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 1992

Synopsis

During the later half of the nineteenth century, a majority of Brazilian women worked, most as domestic servants, either slave or free. House and Street re-creates the working and personal lives of these women, drawing on a wealth of documentation from archival, court, and church records.

Lauderdale Graham traces the intricate and ambivalent relations that existed between masters and servants. She shows how for servants the house could be a place of protection—as well as oppression—while the street could be dangerous—but also more autonomous. She integrates her discoveries with larger events taking place in Rio de Janeiro during the period, including the epidemics of the 1850s, the abolition of slavery, the demolition of slums, and major improvements in sanitation during the first decade of the 1900s.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

This book is not only about the slave and free women who labored as domestic servants in Rio de Janeiro in the years between 1860 and 1910. The concern is to recover the experiences of servant women as they conducted working and private lives, and to see them as they were seen and reacted to by those who owned or hired them, the actions expressed in their lives and the meanings those actions can be made to disclose--the 'webs of significance' in Clifford Geertz's phrase--led quickly to the multiple contexts in which servants located their lives.

Review:

"Social and feminist historians will certainly applaud the sensitivity with which this book unveils the duress of servants' working and living conditions without neglecting to portray human endurance and individual or collective resistance to oppression from above. Everybody will read with great pleasure this creative, well argued and elegantly written book." (Journal of Latin American Studies)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0292727577
• ISBN 13: 9780292727571
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224