Reproducing Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

Slave women’s reproductive practices are central to understanding the gradual emancipation process in Brazil. In 1850, Brazil finally gave in to British political pressure and ended its trans-Atlantic slave trade. As a slave society reliant on the external reproduction of labor, Brazil now became a society beholden to the natural reproduction of its female slaves. In 1871, the Brazilian parliament passed the Law of the Free Womb, which freed the unborn children of all slave women. In 1885, the Sexagenarian Law freed all slaves over the age of 60. Finally, in 1888, full abolition occurred. Using court cases, medical journals, and legislative debate, this paper looks at the rhetoric surrounding slave women’s reproductive and maternal practices. I argue that initially, Brazilian elites saw women’s fertility control practices as resistance to their enslaved state. Yet legal debates allowed slave women theoretical access to upper-class white feminine virtues such as sexual honor and motherhood, setting the stage for post-1871 readings of slave reproduction as the fulfillment of women’s natural roles as mothers. While pro-slavery stalwarts argued against the 1871 Law of the Free Womb by citing future high infant mortality rates, none blamed these possible increases on slave women’s fertility control practices, suggesting that they too saw slave women’s natural roles as maternal. Free black women, for their part, used the maternal roles available to them to guarantee their freedom as well as that of their children. In the end, motherhood became social capital that female slaves used to petition the state for equal rights