As mulheres escravas na demografia e na economia de Santarém (1870 – 1888)

Abstract

This article focuses on slave women in the city of Santarém in the last decades of black slavery and aims to understand how these women were inserted into the city's economy and demography. The historiography on slavery has pointed to the role of slaves as active subjects, although subjugated to a dehumanizing system, who were able to weave networks of sociability and adopt mechanisms of resistance, which could be on the margins or within the legality. With regard to slave women, it is important to take into account their experiences and the particularities they carried in the daily life of slavery, since the social relations established by them, the spaces they occupied and the activities they performed, as well as their resistance mechanisms were crossed by the gender issue. The time frame established in this article covers the period from 1870 to 1888, in which the wombs of these women became a central element in the process of gradual abolition of slavery through the Free Womb Law. The sources used for this research were the post-mortem inventories produced during this period in the District of Santarém and the 1872 Census.