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‘As a slave woman and as a mother’:

women and the abolition of slavery in
Havana and Rio de Janeiro*
a
Camillia Cowling
a
University of Nottingham
Published online: 04 Oct 2011.

To cite this article: Camillia Cowling (2011) ‘As a slave woman and as a mother’: women and
the abolition of slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro*, Social History, 36:3, 294-311, DOI:
10.1080/03071022.2011.598728

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2011.598728

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 Social History Vol. 36 No. 3 August 2011

Camillia Cowling

‘As a slave woman and as a mother’:

women and the abolition of slavery in
Havana and Rio de Janeiro*
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‘. . . this unfortunate mother begs Your Excellency, in virtue of the current Law . . . to
order the aforementioned black girls to be handed over to their mother . . .’
(Ursula Canton to Governor General, Havana 17 August 1883)1

‘. . . the Supplicant requests that provisions be taken, not just for the mandate of this
Court to be respected, but for [her daughter] Maria to be handed over to her . . .’
(Josepha Gonçalves de Moraes, Rio de Janeiro, 26 July 1886)2

INTRODUCTION
In August 1883, in the suburb of Regla across the bay from Havana, freedwoman Ursula
Canton petitioned for custody of her daughters, Francisca and Guadalupe. Her appeal was only
one more step in a long-running battle, first to acquire her own legal freedom and then to
achieve the family union that would give lived meaning to this legal status. Her petition
referred to her daughters’ newly acquired legal rights under the 1880 patronato (apprenticeship)
law for slavery’s gradual abolition in Cuba, while simultaneously invoking her own extra-legal
‘moral’ rights as their mother.

*The author would like to thank the staff of the
Arquivo Nacional (Rio de Janeiro), Arquivo Geral
da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, Archivo Nacional de
Cuba, Biblioteca Nacional (Rio de Janeiro) and
Biblioteca Nacional José Martı́ (Havana) for
assistance with the research for this article.
Research and writing were funded by the Institute
for the Study of Slavery, University of Notting-
ham, UK, and the Leverhulme Trust, UK. Thanks
to all those – too many to name individually –
who read my work and contributed to my ideas.
Thanks to the anonymous readers and editors of
Social History for their valuable comments.
1
‘Documento conteniendo instancia de Ursula
Canton sobre sus hijas Francisca y Guadalupe’,
Archivo Nacional de Cuba (henceforth ANC),
fondo Miscelánea de Expedientes (henceforth
ME), legajo 3724, expediente Q, 1883.
2
Josepha v. José Gonçalves de Pinho, Arquivo
Nacional, Brazil (henceforth ANB), Juı́zo de
Órphãos, ZM, maço 2292, número 2198, 1884,
42.

Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 online ª 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/03071022.2011.598728
 August 2011 Women and the abolition of slavery 295
Ursula’s actions might have sounded grimly familiar to slaveholding couple José and Maria
Amélia Gonçalves de Pinho, living over 4000 miles away in the other capital city of the
Americas undergoing gradual abolition. On the night of 26 July 1886, at their home on Dois
de Dezembro street in Catete, Rio de Janeiro, the couple and their family were surprised by
a visit from two local judicial officials bearing a warrant to remove a young servant girl, Maria,
from the Gonçalves’ household to undergo judicial process. The visit was the outcome of
many insistent petitions made by Josepha, Maria’s mother and the couple’s former slave, to
gain custody of her daughter. The Gonçalves couple resisted the officials’ attempt to remove
Maria, just as José Gonçalves had done on another occasion a few days previously, ‘throwing
them out of the door, and declaring he would have nothing to do with the order’ of the judge.
Yet a further petition by Josepha ensured that a couple of days later, the Gonçalves did allow
local judicial authorities into their home to question Maria.3
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Through the stories of Ursula Canton and Josepha Gonçalves de Moraes, and of other
enslaved and freed women who, like them, inhabited the capital cities of the last two major
slaveholding countries of the Americas, this article explores how such women came to play a
crucial – yet hitherto largely unrecognized – part in speeding and shaping the parallel gradual
emancipation processes that unfolded in each country in the 1870s and 1880s.4 Work with
slaves’ legal claims for freedom in each setting reveals that women like Ursula and Josepha
were at the front line of countless legal battles waged by the enslaved and their relatives.
There were various interrelated reasons why this should be the case. First, in both Brazil and
Cuba, the abolition process was shaped by ‘free womb’ measures introduced in the early 1870s
which, along with other subsequent legislation, created specific new opportunities for women
to make legal claims on the basis of motherhood. Second, such petitions chimed not only with
official legal rights but with broader Atlantic abolitionist discourse that sought emotive
‘feminine’ responses to slaves’ plight and appealed particularly to particular notions of maternal
love. Third, the struggles of women like Ursula and Josepha were shaped by their experiences
of life on the streets, at the marketplaces and in the crowded popular housing of each of these
last slaveholding capital cities, making their search for freedom and understanding of its
meanings a collective process shared by other women like them, who made up a large part of
each city’s population. Despite the major differences between the broader economic and
political trajectories of each country and city, the similarities between women’s actions and
contributions to the emancipation process are particularly striking.

WOMEN AND GRADUAL ABOLITION IN BRAZIL AND CUBA

Josepha and Ursula each lived through the gradual legal abolition of slavery, a process that
unfolded simultaneously and in similar ways in both Brazil and Cuba. These were the only major
remaining slave societies of the Americas by the 1870s, having both profited from a ‘second
slavery’ as neighbouring powers abolished the institution one by one.5 Abolition in the United

3 5
Josepha v. José Gonçalves de Pinho, op. cit., Dale W. Tomich, ‘The second slavery: bonded
39–39v. labour and the transformation of the nineteenth-
4
I use the word ‘countries’ throughout to avoid century world economy’ in Francisco Ramı́rez
the clumsiness of ‘country and territory’ or (ed.), Rethinking the Nineteenth Century (Stanford,
‘country and colony’ that Cuba’s colonial status 1988), 103–17. For a recent collection of essays on
in this period would otherwise necessitate. the theme, see Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske
 296 Social History vol. 36 : no. 3
States following the Civil War (1861–5) left Brazil and Spain isolated as slaveholding powers
on a continent now committed to ‘free’ labour, making attention to the issue unavoidable.
Although the timing was similar, the political circumstances in which abolition came about
were quite different in each setting. For Cuba, a colony increasingly champing at the bit of
Spanish rule, the abolition question was bound up from the start with the question of the
island’s relationship with the metropolis. The Ten Years’ War against the Spanish broke out in
eastern Cuba in 1868 and continued until 1878, with a further conflict in the ‘Little War’ of
1879. Soon after the outbreak of war, Cuban rebels declared the ‘abolition’ of slavery in the
territories they controlled, forcing the issue higher up the agenda for Spain.6 From the mid-
1860s, meanwhile, a strong abolitionist movement developed in metropolitan Spain, although
abolitionist organizing or publishing on the island was stifled by a colonial power afraid that
discussing slavery would lead to discussing independence.7 By contrast, Brazil, an independent
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nation since 1822, abolished slavery from the inside. Its parliament opted to gradually phase out
and eventually abolish slavery in the 1870s and 1880s. The process arose as a result of a complex
set of social and political shifts: from economic rationalist and ‘modernizing’ arguments among
planters and political elites, to the pressure of a diverse, localized and vociferous abolition
movement, to the increasing concentration of the enslaved population in the south-east of the
country, to the experience of the Paraguay War (1865–70) in which enslaved men fought in
return for manumission and Brazilian troops declared abolition in Paraguay, to the diverse
struggles and initiatives of the enslaved themselves.8
Despite their different circumstances, the means of ending slavery employed in Brazil and
Cuba were similar. Eyeing each other, and aiming at a peaceful transition that would be as
slow as possible, Spain and Brazil each enacted ‘free womb’ laws in the early 1870s (the 1870
Moret law in Spain, and the 1871 Rio Branco law in Brazil).9 The laws technically ‘freed’
children subsequently born to enslaved women, ensuring that the transition would occur via

(eds), ‘The second slavery: mass slavery, world
economy, and comparative microhistories’, parts 1
and 2, special editions of Review: Journal of the
Fernand Braudel Centre, XXXI, 2 and 3 (2008).
6
For example, Raúl Cepero Bonilla, Azúcar y
abolición [Sugar and Abolition] (Barcelona [1948],
1976), 164–91, 201–8; Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba:
Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel
Hill, 1999), 15–42.
7
Arthur Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of
Slavery in Cuba, 1871–1886 (Austin, 1967), 153–
73; J. M. Pérez-Prendes, ‘La revista El Abolicionista
en la génesis de la abolición de la esclavitud en las
Antillas Españolas’, Anuario de Estudios Americanos
[Annual Review of American Studies], XLIII (1986),
215–40; Christopher Schmidt-Nowara,
‘‘‘Spanish’’ Cuba: race and class in Spanish and
Cuban antislavery ideology, 1861–1868’, Cuban
Studies/Estudios Cubanos, XXV (1997), 101–22.
8
Within the vast literature, among which
scholars take up their own positions in the
abolition debate, see, for example: George Reid
Andrews, Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, Seymour
Drescher, Robert M. Levine and Rebecca J. Scott,
The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of
Emancipation in Brazil (Durham, 1988); Celso
Castilho, ‘Abolition Matters: The Politics of
Antislavery in Pernambuco, Brazil, 1869–1888’
(Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2008);
Sidney Chalhoub, Visões da Liberdade: uma história
das últimas décadas da escravidão na Corte [Visions of
Liberty: A History of the Last Decades of Slavery in the
Court] (São Paulo, 1990); Robert E. Conrad, The
Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (Berke-
ley, 1972); Maria Helena Machado, O plano e o
pânico: os movimentos sociais na década da abolição [The
Plan and the Panic: Social Movements in the Decade of
Abolition] (Rio de Janeiro, 1994); Robert B.
Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (New
York, 1972).
9
On the influence of Spain’s 1870 law in Brazil
see Celso Castilho, ‘Brisas atlánticas: la abolición
gradual y la conexión brasileña–cubana’ in Paul
Lovejoy and Rina Cáceres (eds), Haitı́: revolución y
emancipación [Haiti: Revolution and Emancipation]
(San José, Costa Rica, 2008), 128–39.
 August 2011 Women and the abolition of slavery 297
10
the bodies of women like Ursula and Josepha. Both countries then witnessed a series of other
legal changes prior to the advent of final abolition in Cuba (1886) and Brazil (1888). Laws like
the the Brazilian Saraiva–Cotegipe law of 1885 or the Cuban patronato law of 1880 (which set a
time limit for the end of slavery and renamed all remaining slaves patrocinados, or apprentices)
took measures like regulating self-purchase, freeing the elderly and forbidding the separation
of enslaved families, especially mothers and children. Such legislation was rightly condemned
by both contemporary abolitionists and subsequently by many historians as insufficient or
downright conservative in intention.11 Nonetheless, historians of each country have shown
that enslaved people were able to use the law to seek their own and others’ freedom, speeding
and expanding the course of legal abolition.12 A recent crop of studies of slavery or abolition
that examine both Brazil and Cuba confirms a growing interest in cross-national research on
these two similar yet very different settings.13
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Within the burgeoning literature on slave agency and abolition, the crucial role of women
like Ursula and Josepha in the abolition process has been much less remarked upon.14 Across

10
For an English translation of the Rio Branco
or ‘free womb’ law, see Conrad, op. cit., 305–8.
My use of quotation marks reflects the fact that in
Brazil, the law was not immediately described as
the ‘free womb’ law at the time. The exact legal
status of enslaved women’s wombs was left
undefined by the law, and was instead negotiated
in complex ways afterwards. This had vital
political implications for the status of this genera-
tion of children. For a discussion of this, see
Sidney Chalhoub, Machado de Assis, historiador
[Machado de Assis, Historian] (São Paulo, 2003),
171–82, 266–9. The point is applicable in a
broader sense to Cuba too, where enslaved
mothers engaged in complex negotiations about
the exact meanings of their children’s legal status.
For a reproduction of the Spanish law see
Fernando Ortiz, Los negros esclavos [The Black
Slaves] (Havana [1916], 1996), 317–20.
11
Marı́a del Carmen Barcia, ‘Táctica y estrategia
de la burguesı́a esclavista en Cuba ante la abolición
de la esclavitud’, Anuario de Estudios Americanos,
XLIII (1986), 111–26; Conrad, op. cit., 104–5, 107–
17; Maria Lúcia Lamounier, ‘Between Slavery and
Free Labour: Experiments with Free Labour and
Patterns of Slave Emancipation in Brazil and
Cuba, c. 1830–1888’ (Ph.D., London School of
Economics, 1993), 300–4, 319–21.
12
For two classic examples among a very broad
literature on slave agency, see Chalhoub, Visões da
Liberdade, op. cit. and Rebecca Scott, Slave
Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labour,
1860–1899 (Princeton, 1985).
13
For example, Laird W. Bergad, The Compara-
tive Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba and the United
States (Cambridge, 2007); Lamounier, op. cit.;
Márcia Berbel, Rafael Marquese and Tâmis
Parron, Escravidão e Polı́tica: Brasil e Cuba, 1790–
1850 [Slavery and Politics: Brazil and Cuba, 1790–
1850] (São Paulo, 2010); Rafael Marquese, Feitores
do corpo, missionários da mente: senhores, letrados e o
controle dos escravos nas Américas, 1660–1860 [Over-
seers of Bodies, Missionaries of Minds: Masters, Men of
Letters and the Control of Slaves in the Americas, 1660–
1860] (São Paulo, 2004); Christopher Schmidt-
Nowara, ‘Empires against emancipation: Spain,
Brazil and the abolition of slavery’, Review: Journal
of the Fernand Braudel Centre, XXXI, 2 (2008);
Rebecca J. Scott, ‘Defining the boundaries of
freedom in the world of cane: Cuba, Brazil and
Louisiana after emancipation’, American Historical
Review, XCIX, 1 (February 1994), 70–102 and
Rebecca J. Scott, ‘Exploring the meaning of
freedom: postemancipation societies in compara-
tive perspective’, Hispanic American Historical Re-
view, LXVIII, 3 (1988), 407–28.
14
Some notable exceptions are: Martha Abreu,
‘Slave mothers and free children: emancipation
and female space in debates on the ‘‘free womb’’
law, Rio de Janeiro, 1871’, Journal of Latin
American Studies, XXVIII, 3 (1996), 567–80; Eduardo
Spiller Pena, Pajens da Casa Imperial: Jurisconsultos,
escravidão e a lei de 1871 [Retinue of the Imperial
Court: Jurists, Slavery and the Law of 1871]
(Campinas, 2001); and Aisnara Perera Dı́az and
Marı́a de los Ángeles Meriño Fuentes, La cesión de
patronato: uma estratégia familiar em la emancipación de
los esclavos en Cuba [Renunciations of Apprenticeship:
A Family Strategy in the Emancipation of Slaves in
Cuba] (San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, 2009).
Women appear frequently, but are mainly not
considered specifically, in Chalhoub, Visões, op.
cit., 95–174; Keila Grinberg, Liberata: A lei da
ambiguidade: as ações de liberdade da Corte de Apelação
 298 Social History vol. 36 : no. 3
American slave societies and time periods, scholars have long noted how women always
achieved manumission in greater numbers than men.15 Yet the particular legal process of
gradual abolition undergone by these two last slave-owning societies brought women to centre
stage in the daily dramas playing out in the courts in the capital cities of Rio and Havana in
specific, new and comparable ways, making attention to their actions and options a vital part of
understanding abolition more broadly.

LITIGATING FOR FREEDOM

Havana and Rio de Janeiro each had a long tradition of urban slavery. They also, however,
each had a corresponding tradition of the achievement of urban freedom. Enslaved people
living in cities, and particularly capital cities, generally had greater freedom of movement and
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earning potential and closer personal relations with owners than did those in rural areas,
providing them with greater manumission opportunities. When such opportunities did not
suffice, they were also geographically closer than were their rural counterparts to mechanisms
of legal and official redress. Enslaved people were acutely aware of this, and made constant
attempts to reach cities and make freedom claims there, complicating any easy distinction
between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ slavery.16
From 1870, gradual legal abolition was formally administered from these capital cities.
Home to central legal and political institutions from the Brazilian national parliament,
municipal government or appeals court in Rio, to the Spanish Governor General and assorted
colonial offices in Havana, these cities were also the dwelling-places of the elites who peopled
such institutions: here they socialized, wrote and formed ideas. National elites and foreign
travellers alike were particularly influenced by what they saw around them in the cities where
they spent most of their time, and hence what happened in the capitals was crucial for the
broader formation of national/colonial opinion.17 Enslaved people seeking freedom in each
city in the 1870s and 1880s drew on a broad range of potential allies: abolitionists, journalists or

do Rio de Janeiro no século XIX [Liberata: The Law of
Ambiguity: Freedom Suits in the Rio de Janeiro
Appeals Court in the Nineteenth Century] (Rio de
Janeiro, 1994), 15–20, 29–36, 61–2; Scott, Slave
Emancipation, op. cit., 141–71.
15
The literature on manumission is too ex-
tensive to list here; for a comparative overview of
manumission by sex see Laird Bergad, Fe Iglesias
and Marı́a del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave
Market, 1790–1880 (Cambridge, 1995), 123–4, 130,
138–41. See also Diana Paton and Pamela Scully,
‘Introduction’ in Pamela Scully and Diana Paton
(eds), Gender and Emancipation in the Atlantic World
(Durham, 2005), 6–7.
16
On urban slavery and urban routes to freedom
see, for example, Matthias Röhrig Assunção and
Michael Zeuske, ‘‘‘Race’’, ethnicity and social
structure in nineteenth century Brazil and Cuba’,
Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv, XXIV, 3–4 (1998), 406;
Laird Bergad, Fe Iglesias and Marı́a del Carmen
Barcia, ‘Coartación and letters of freedom’ in
Bergad et al., op. cit., 122–42; Keila Grinberg,
‘Freedom suits and civil law in Brazil and the
United States’, Slavery and Abolition, XXII, 3
(December 2001), 66–82; Mary Karasch, Slave Life
in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, 1987),
336–7. On slave movement and mobility in
nineteenth-century Cuba see Matt D. Childs,
The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle
against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill, 2006), 46–8,
76, 116, 138–9.
17
Franklin Knight rightly highlighted how
foreign travel writers spent most of their time
in cities and therefore paid disproportionate
attention to urban slaves, who were only a small
‘elite’. For this very reason, however, the actions
of urban slaves had visibility beyond their
numbers. Franklin Knight, Slave Society in Cuba
during the Nineteenth Century (Madison, 1970),
60–1.
 August 2011 Women and the abolition of slavery 299
lawyers; the Brazilian Imperial Family or the British Consul in Havana; as well as, crucially, the
freed population with whom slaves’ daily lives and labour were intertwined.18
In Brazil, freedom suits came before the courts. The enslaved claimant was allocated a
curador (legal representative) to ‘speak’ for them. Cases not resolved by first instance courts
passed to appeals courts. The records of these ações de liberdade, used by many historians to shed
light on the actions and options of the enslaved in general, are also a rich mine for scholars
interested in women’s agency and the dynamics of gender in the abolition process.19
By contrast, while some Cuban claims in this period reached the law courts, most bypassed
them because local and provincial boards ( Juntas de Libertos and Juntas de Patronato) were
established by the 1870 and 1880 laws to deal with such disputes. As in Brazil, official
representatives (called sı́ndicos in Cuba) were responsible for ‘speaking’ for the enslaved. Yet
the latter also often bypassed the sı́ndicos, at least initially, simply presenting themselves at the
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Juntas; others made direct appeals instead to the highest colonial authorities based in Havana. In
both countries, making a legal claim involved illiterate enslaved men and women in seeking
literate, usually white, male, elite allies, to ‘translate’ their spoken words and initiatives into
petitions for official consideration. By definition, these documents shed fascinating light on the
complex process of negotiation between these different parties, rather than representing
claimants’ undiluted ‘voices’.20
The claims lend themselves mainly to qualitative, not quantitative, analysis. Only relatively
small numbers of the enslaved population could marshal the necessary personal, logistical and
financial resources involved in making a claim at all, and it is unclear what proportion of claims
made have survived. However, work with those that do exist suggests that, at least in the post-
1870 period, women represented a striking majority of those pursuing suits for freedom at any
given time. For Brazil, a database of ações de liberdade from Rio’s appeals court compiled by
Keila Grinberg (available online at: http://www.ceo.historia.uff.br/c.php?c¼banco_dados)
contains thirty cases for or against the freedom of individuals identifiable by sex made in Rio
between 1871 and 1888. Twenty-seven of these (90 per cent) concerned female slaves. This
represents a major difference from the period 1850–70 where, of 34 appeals by individuals or

18
On Luiz Gama, the most famous Afro-
Brazilian lawyer involved in defending slaves in
court, who was based in São Paulo, see Elciene
Azevedo, Orfeu de Carapinha: a trajetória de Luiz
Gama na imperial cidade de São Paulo [Afro Orpheus:
The Trajectory of Luiz Bama in the Imperial City of
São Paulo] (Campinas, 1999); on abolitionism and
journalists in Rio see Rebecca Baird Bergstresser,
‘The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1880–1889’ (Ph.D.,
Stanford University, 1973); on British consuls in
Havana and in Rio see Camillia Cowling,
‘Matrices of Opportunity: Women of Colour,
Gender and the Ending of Slavery in Havana and
Rio de Janeiro 1870–1888’ (Ph.D., University of
Nottingham, 2007), 220.
19
See Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, Das cores
do silêncio: os significados da liberdade no sudeste
escravista – Brasil século XIX [The Colours of Silence:
The Meanings of Liberty in the Slaveholding South-
east – Brazil in the Nineteenth Century] (Rio de
Janeiro, 1995), 193–218; Chalhoub, Visões, op. cit.;
Grinberg, Liberata, op. cit.; Joseli Mendonça, Entre
a mão e os anéis: A lei dos sexagenários e os caminhos da
abolição no Brasil [Between the Hand and the Rings:
The Sexagenarian Law and the Routes to Abolition in
Brazil] (Campinas, 1999), 221–79; Spiller Pena, op.
cit., 80–7, 189–94.
20
On enslaved people’s use of writing, see
Sandra Lauderdale Graham, ‘Writing from the
margins: Brazilian slaves and written culture’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History, XLIX, 3
(2007), 611–36 and Aisnara Perera Dı́az and Marı́a
de los Ángeles Meriño Fuentes, ‘Yo, el Notario:
breve reflexión micro-histórica sobre el poder de
la escritura’, Boletim de história demográfica [Bulletin
of Demographic History], XXXIII, 11 (September
2004).
 300 Social History vol. 36 : no. 3
same-sex groups identifiable by sex, 16 (47 per cent) were by women, and 18 (53 per cent) by
men. In Cuba, in a wider sample of 710 claims, held in the Miscelánea de Expedientes
collection at the Cuban National Archive and initiated mainly in the city of Havana, by
individuals identifiable by sex from 1870–86, 452 (64 per cent) were made by women. Within
this, of 130 appeals made explicitly on behalf of another person (usually the claimant’s
children), 105 (81 per cent) were made by women. Samples of similar claims held in other
ANC collections revealed similar tendencies: more claims after 1870, and the predominance of
women, especially in cases involving the freedom of children and family members.21
Part of the reason for this strong female presence was that transition legislation in each
context brought enslaved women to the front line of the struggle to achieve and defend
freedom. The 1870 and 1871 ‘free womb’ laws reversed, at least in theory, the Roman-derived
practice of partus sequitur ventrem, whereby children’s status followed that of their mothers. This
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practice was common across the slaveholding Americas and was fundamental to the workings
and perpetuation of slavery as an institution, so it is surprising how little explicit analysis it has
received from historians of slavery and abolition.22 After 1870–1, children born to enslaved
women were technically free. Yet in each case they were obliged to serve their mothers’
owners, until the age of 18 (in Cuba) and 21 (in Brazil). In practice, their condition was often
little different from that of slaves, unless their mothers could use the law to wrest these
children’s freedom and their own maternal custody over them from owners.
Such an attempt was made by Josepha, who had gained her own freedom in 1880 and
appealed in 1884 for custody of Maria, then aged ten. Josepha alleged that the Gonçalves
couple were ill-treating Maria, breaking the obligations toward ingênuos (the term that came to
be standard use to denote children born ‘free’) stipulated by the 1871 law. They were not
feeding or clothing Maria, she alleged. Neighbours’ testimony described a hungry, ragged girl
who often went to her mother’s house to ask for food and money.23 As well as wanting the
best care possible for Maria, Josepha perhaps thought her own newly attained free status
promised custody of her daughter, something systematically denied to mothers by slavery.
Meanwhile, other women in Brazil haggled over the legal status of the ‘fruit’ of their
wombs.24 The question of children born to women who had been conditionally freed, for
example – long ill-resolved in Brazilian legal practice – took on particular political significance
with the discussions of the ‘free womb’ law finally passed in September 1871. (For Cuba,
a similar question regarding the children of mothers who had achieved coartación – a
downpayment towards freedom that guaranteed particular rights – had been resolved in

21
For further analysis, see Cowling, op. cit., 21–6.
Note that the Brazilian sample does not include the
multiple claims that reached only first instance
courts (collated, in 2007, alongside with appeals
court cases and miscellaneous other judicial docu-
ments involving slaves, into a database available at
the ANB). Many thanks to Keila Grinberg for
sharing her data with me from the earliest stages of
my work with these documents. For her own
analysis of the ações see Grinberg, Liberata, op. cit.
22
For a fascinating exception see Joseph Dorsey,
‘Women without history: slavery and the politics
of partus sequitur ventrem in the Spanish Caribbean’,
Journal of Caribbean History, XXVIII, 2 (1994), 165–
207. On partus sequitur ventrem in Brazil, see
Camillia Cowling, ‘Debating womanhood, defin-
ing freedom: the abolition of slavery in 1880s Rio
de Janeiro’, Gender and History, XXII, 2 (August
2010), 284–301.
23
Witness statements, 23 July and 22 September
1884, Josepha v. José Gonçalves de Pinho, 7–12v
and 25v–32.
24
On the idea that children belonged to
women’s owners just as fruit belonged to the
owner of the tree on which it grew, see Chalhoub,
Machado de Assis, op. cit., 137–8, 168–82.
 August 2011 Women and the abolition of slavery 301
Spanish law many years previously. Women’s coartada status would not be passed on to
children, who counted simply as slaves.)25 During the fierce Brazilian parliamentary debates,
‘both the government and the opposition used the defence of slaves’ maternal rights to justify
and legitimate their analyses’.26 Simultaneously, legal appeals continued to be made by
conditionally freed mothers about their children. The spirit of the parliamentary debates spilled
over into lawyers’ deliberations and judges’ decisions, with judges tending increasingly to rule
that the conditional freedom of the mother implied the freedom of the child too.27
Enslaved and free(d) women, then, could make specific legal claims based on their status as
mothers. Frequently, however, the mother–child bond was brought into legal cases even
when it did not make any legal difference. In Havana in March 1873, an enslaved woman,
Luisa, deposited 600 pesos with a sı́ndico. She aimed to purchase both her son’s coartación
and her own freedom from her owner, Doña Cándida Vidal. Coartación would increase
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Luisa’s control over her son’s future, making it more difficult for Doña Cándida to sell him
without her intervention. Luisa undertook to pay the daily wage (jornal) he owed to Doña
Cándida, so to all intents and purposes he would be ‘free’, as long as she could keep up the
payments.
However, after Luisa made her deposit, the sı́ndico failed to procure the corresponding
freedom and coartación documents. Her response was to take her complaint to the Gobierno
Superior Polı́tico, one of the colonial government bodies to which enslaved people frequently
had recourse. According to an initial statement drafted by a scribe on Luisa’s behalf, this was a
failure to ‘comply with such sacred duties’ as freeing a mother and guaranteeing her son’s
future. Summing up the case for the Gobierno’s consideration, government official Vicente
González de Valés later stated: ‘The black woman Luisa is worthy of consideration as a slave
woman and as a mother . . . there is nothing more just than to carry out what she requests,
because it is very just’. It was certainly ‘just’ for the neglectful sı́ndico to attend to Luisa ‘as a
slave woman’ – defending enslaved people was part of his job. However, there was no official
stipulation that he should take particular notice of her ‘as a mother’.28 This, then, was an
extra-legal argument, which stressed the socially recognized rights of motherhood, contained
within a legal case. Why would Luisa, or González de Valés, writing on her behalf, think
this line of argument might have success with the authorities by whom the case would be
judged?

25
See Hubert Aimes, ‘Coartación: a Spanish
institution for the advancement of slaves into
freedmen’, Yale Review, XII (February 1909), 418–
20. For a recent discussion of coartación and the
associated right of papel see Alejandro de la Fuente,
‘Slaves and the creation of legal rights in Cuba:
Coartación and Papel’, Hispanic American Historical
Review, LXXXVII, 4 (November 2007), 659–92.
26
Abreu, op. cit., 576.
27
For examples of legal battles over this issue-
both resolved in favour of the freedom of the
children of conditionally enslaved women- that
occurred while the debates took place, see ‘Ismael
(escravo), Domiciano, Laurelio, Basilia’, ANB,
Corte de Apelação, Escravos (henceforth CAE),
caixa 3687, número 8140, 1872; ‘Henrique preto
menor por seu curador Joaquim Pereira Bastos’,
ANB, CAE, caixa 3682, número 13335, 1870. For
discussions of these issues see Chalhoub, Visões, op.
cit., 123–30; Keila Grinberg, O fiador dos brasileiros:
cidadania, escravidão e direito civil no tempo de Antonio
Pereira Rebouças [The Guarantor of the Brazilians:
Citizenship, Slavery and Civil Law in the Time of
Antonio Pereira Rebouças] (Rio de Janeiro, 2002),
213–16; Spiller Pena, op. cit., 80–116.
28
‘Expediente promovido por Luisa Criolla
(sobre su libertad) (esclava de Doña Cándida Vidal)
en queja de no haber efectuado su coartación a pesar
de haber puesto una cantidad en depósito’, ANC,
ME, legajo 3527, expediente Bñ, 1873.
 302 Social History vol. 36 : no. 3

WOMANHOOD AND ABOLITIONIST RHETORIC

Part of the answer to this question is that the phrase ‘as a slave woman and as a mother’ chimed
with broader gendered trends in abolitionist discourse, in evidence from Madrid to Havana to
Rio. Breaking with moderate emancipationist positions advanced throughout the nineteenth
century, more radical abolitionist movements formed from the mid-1860s in Spain and from
the 1870s and especially 1880s in Brazil, calling for immediate rather than gradual abolition.29
While abolitionist arguments in each included a strong element of economic rationalism,
seeing slavery as an obstacle to ‘progress’, they also drew increasingly on strong humanitarian
arguments, using emotive imagery to seek the empathy of readers and audiences with the
plight of the enslaved in ways that often recalled previous Atlantic anti-slavery campaigns in
Britain and subsequently the United States.30 This strategy also aimed to reach new groups of
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supporters not previously included in the formal political sphere, including women.31 Images
of suffering enslaved mothers and children carried particular emotional currency. One of the
most prevalent abolitionist tropes, endlessly recycled back and forth across the Atlantic, was the
argument that slavery separated enslaved families.32 Already in 1840, the poems of Cuban ex-
slave Juan Francisco Manzano, published with abolitionist backing in London, reflected this
concern:

Three [births] in the last twelve months, and two of these

Had died, because the mothers did not please
To rear up slaves; and they preferred to see
Their children dead before their face, e’re they
Would give their young ‘negritos’ to the kind
Indulgent masters which they are said to find.33

Reflecting this long-standing argument, the Spanish 1870 law not only ‘freed’ the womb but
supposedly prevented the separation of children aged under 14 from their mothers.

29
See Bergstresser, op. cit.; Conrad, op. cit.;
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Anti-
slavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874
(Pittsburgh, 1999); Toplin, op. cit.
30
For a comparative analysis of abolitionist
movements see Seymour Drescher, ‘Brazilian
abolition in comparative perspective’, Hispanic
American Historical Review, LXVIII, 3 (August
1988), 429–60.
31
On abolitionism’s broadening of the political
sphere see Castilho, ‘Abolition matters’, op. cit., vi.
On gendered rhetoric and appeals to women, see
Roger A. Kittleson, ‘Women and notions of
womanhood in Brazilian abolitionism’ in Scully
and Paton (eds), op. cit., 99–120; Roger A.
Kittleson, ‘Campaign of all peace and charity:
gender and the politics of abolitionism in Porto
Alegre, Brazil, 1846–1888’, Slavery and Abolition,
XXII (2001), 83–108.
32
For similar rhetoric employed in earlier
abolitionist campaigns see Kristin Hoganson,
‘Garrisonian abolitionists and the rhetoric of
gender, 1850–1860’, American Quarterly, XLV, 4
(December 1993), 558–95; Claire Midgeley,
Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns,
1780–1870 (London, 1992). For perspectives on
international connections within abolitionism see,
for example, Célia Maria Azevedo, Abolitionism in
the United States and Brazil: A Comparative
Perspective (New York, 1995), 6; Leslie Bethell
and José Murilo de Carvalho (eds), Joaquim Nabuco
e os abolicionistas britânicos: correspondência, 1880–1905
[Joaqim Nabuco and the British Abolitionists: Corre-
spondence, 1880–1905] (Rio de Janeiro, 2008).
33
Juan Francisco Manzano, ‘The sugar estate’ in
R. R. Madden (ed.), Poems by a Slave in the Island
of Cuba, recently liberated; translated from the Spanish
by R. R. Madden (London, 1840), 42.
 August 2011 Women and the abolition of slavery 303
Abolitionists, however, argued that this element of the law was not being enforced.
Spaniard M. Baron Fortacı́n lamented in an 1879 Spanish Abolitionist Society pamphlet that
‘[In Cuba] . . . the philanthropist hears the painful cries of the child separated from its mother,
and of her own separation from the man who is her support, and of all of them from their
home; and if the soul rises up and invokes the family and the justice of God, that soul is sold
for a fistful of gold’.34 In Havana in 1879, journalist Adolfo Márquez Sterling took advantage
of a brief opening of space for discussion of the abolition question in Cuba to found a
short-lived liberal newspaper, La Discusión.35 Its series of abolitionist articles focused frequently
on the mother–child separation theme. One of them depicted graphically the moment at
which, in Africa, families were divided up for transport to the Americas: ‘Who could effect
that division without great efforts, since as they were put in one group, the children who saw
their parents in another, hurled themselves towards them; the mothers held their children
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tightly in their arms, and ran with them, receiving flesh wounds without feeling pain, so that
they would not be taken from them.’ Although the African slave traffic to Cuba had ended
by 1867, abolitionist rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic continued to make use of this
trope.36
In Brazil, the formation of the abolitionist movement from 1880 was similarly based in good
measure on arguments that the 1871 law had been insufficient and was not complied with.37
The ‘mission statement’ of the first 1880 number of O Abolicionista, the organ of the well-
known Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society founded by statesman Joaquim Nabuco, railed against
‘advertisements for the buying and selling of human creatures . . . the hiring of mothers,
separated from their children, as the wet nurses of other children, a speculation as vile as it is
lucrative’ and cited ‘the mortality of the ingênuos’ as ‘sources of humiliation for every
Brazilian.’38 The same newspaper, two months later, reproduced extracts from a speech made
at the festival of Nossa Senhora do Rosário, in the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, by cleric
Dr Augusto Joaquim de Siqueira Canabarro:

Do you hear the wail of a child? It . . . in vain waits for the moment when it can rest its
lips on the maternal breast . . . in vain, yes, because not far away, some tears . . . tell us that
a loving mother, just like all other mothers but for the fact that the mark of slavery weighs
upon her, cannot reach her child, because a power strange to her gave her a child which
was also a stranger, towards which, however, she, ignoring the fruit of her own body, is
obliged to lavish all her care, all her affection! Do your ears not hear the sobs and laments
that seem to challenge the most hardened of hearts? They are children that . . . are

34
M. Baron Fortacı́n, La abolición de la esclavitud
[The Abolition of Slavery] (Madrid, 1879), 7. For an
analysis of the use of images of home and family in
1860s Spanish abolitionism, see Schmidt-Nowara,
‘‘‘Spanish’’ Cuba’, op. cit., 114–16.
35
On the opening up of spaces for discussion of
abolition in Cuba in the late 1870s and early 1880s
see Scott, Slave Emancipation, op. cit., 136–7.
36
The article is reproduced, along with various
others published in La Discusión, as Adolfo
Márquez Sterling and Francisco Giralt, ‘En
nombre de honor y de Dios: II’ in Adolfo
Márquez Sterling and Francisco Giralt, En nombre
del honor y de Dios: folleto [In the Name of Honour and
God: Pamphlet] (Havana, 1882), 17.
37
See Celso Castilho and Camillia Cowling,
‘Funding freedom, popularizing politics: aboli-
tionism and local emancipation funds in 1880s
Brazil’, Luso-Brazilian Review, XLVII, 1 (Spring
2010), 89–120.
38
‘A nossa missão’, O Abolicionista [The Aboli-
tionist] (1 November 1880), 1.
 304 Social History vol. 36 : no. 3
separated from the woman who gave them their being; they are mothers who will never
see their children again.39

By explicitly comparing the plight of enslaved mothers with the lot of ‘all other mothers’,
Canabarro used the idea of motherhood as a way of ‘levelling’ the subjects and the objects in
his speech, signifying fundamental equality between all human beings. Nossa Senhora do
Rosário was a well-known Afro-Brazilian religious festival and brotherhood in colonial and
imperial Brazil. Canabarro’s audience probably included abolitionist sympathizers black and
white, female and male, enslaved and free.40
Thus, when women like Ursula and their representatives claimed their rights as ‘unfortunate
mothers’, they invoked ideas that had a social and discursive weight far beyond the realms of
their statutory legal rights. While motherhood was by no means the only grounds on which
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women appealed for freedom, it did become a powerful legal and social tool in this period in
both countries.41 But what made women like Ursula and Josepha seek freedom through the
courts in the first place?

‘THE DOMESTIC SLAVES SAY . . .’: CLAIMS-MAKING AT STREET LEVEL

Enslaved and freed women had long formed a central component of the life of Atlantic
slaveholding cities, from Charleston to Lima, from Paramaribo to San Juan.42 Rio and Havana
were no exception. Women of colour visibly shaped each city’s urban landscape, walking the
streets selling food items, dominating commerce at marketplaces and washing clothes at public
fountains.43 Each city was growing rapidly, swelled by European migrants but also by enslaved
and free newcomers from surrounding areas and other parts of each country. Many women

39
‘A emancipação na tribuna sagrada’, O Aboli-
cionista [The Abolitionist] (1 January 1881), 7–8.
40
For the history of the festival and brotherhood
see Marina de Mello e Souza, Reis negros no Brasil
escravista: história da festa de coroação de Rei Congo
[Black Kings in Brazilian Slave Society: History of the
Festival of the Congo King’s Coronation] (Belo
Horizonte, 2002).
41
For example, women’s claims for freedom,
especially in Rio, were frequently based on the
argument that they had been prostituted. Yet most
of these cases, while they led to freedom in the first
instance court, were overturned by the appeals
court to which they were subsequently sent. On
prostitution in Rio see, among others, Sueann
Caulfield, ‘O nascimento do Mangue: raça, nação
e prostituição no Rio de Janeiro, 1850–1920’,
Tempo, IX (2000), 43–63; Chalhoub, Visões, op. cit.,
152–5; Sandra Lauderdale Graham, ‘Slavery’s
impasse: slave prostitutes, small-time mistresses
and the Brazilian law of 1871’, Comparative Studies
in Society and History, XXXIII (1991), 669–94.
42
For one compilation of essays on the
Americas, with a strong emphasis on urban life,
see David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine
(eds), Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Colour in the
Americas (Urbana, 2004).
43
See Flávio dos Santos Gomes and Carlos
Eugênio Lı́bano Soares, ‘‘‘Dizem as quitandeiras’’:
ocupações urbanas e identidades numa cidade
escravista – Rio de Janeiro, século XIX’, Acervo,
XV, 2 (July–December 2002), 3–16; Sheila de
Castro Faria, ‘Sinhás pretas: acumulação de pecúlio
e transmissão de bens de mulheres forras no sudeste
escravista (sécs XVIII–XIX)’ in Francisco Carlos
Teixeira da Silva, Hebe Maria Mattos and Ciro
Flamirion Cardoso (eds), Escritos sobre história e
educação: homenagem a Maria Yedda Leite Linhares
[Writings on History and Education: Homage to Maria
Yedda Leite Linhares] (Rio de Janeiro, 2001), 289–
329; Juliana Barreto Farias, ‘Greve nas Marinhas:
protestos, tradições e identidades entre pequenos
lavradores, quitandeiras e pombeiros no Rio de
Janeiro, século XIX’, Revista ArtCultura (forth-
coming, 2011); Luz Mena, ‘Stretching the limits of
gendered spaces: black and mulatto women in
1830s Havana’, Cuban Studies/ Estudios Cubanos,
XXXVI, 1 (2005), 87–104.
 August 2011 Women and the abolition of slavery 305
44
who gained freedom in Rio in the 1870s and 1880s were recent arrivals. Josepha herself was
from Ceará in the Brazilian north-east, probably sold south as part of the major internal slave
trade.45 Men sold to Rio were frequently sold on again to coffee plantations; women were
more likely to remain in the city and build towards freedom there.46 Arriving around the same
time as Josepha was Tia Ciata, a freeborn Bahian woman who would later be instrumental in
the formation of Rio’s Little Africa community, the hallowed birthplace of samba.47 In Cuba,
women made major efforts to come to Havana from across western and central Cuba, using it
as a space both to gain freedom and then build their lives.48 Couples often lived according to
a ‘geographically gendered division of labour’, with women living in cities while the men
laboured in rural areas.49 This placed women at the centre of family freedom strategies,
pursued principally in cities. Women seeking legal freedom also built on a longer tradition of
significant female participation in claims-making.50 Each legal case was filed separately by
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officials, making claimants’ relationship with the law and with the condition of enslavement
appear at first sight an individual one. Yet a closer look at women’s densely woven networks in
the cities reveals how profoundly this relationship with the law was formed through socially
generated knowledge and practices.
Demographically, enslaved women were especially concentrated in particular urban areas
where demand for their labour was high. In 1853–4, a census of domestic slaves in Havana’s
Third District contained 63 per cent women. In some of this district’s neighbourhoods, the
percentage of women slaves was higher still, reaching 75 per cent in Dragones barrio, for
example. On San Nicolás street, between house numbers 70 and 136, census-takers recorded
22 adult enslaved women, spread between 22 different houses, compared with only four adult
male slaves. The proportions of women remained high as abolition grew nearer. By 1882, a
smaller sample of 220 Havana patrocinados, living in and around the same area as the earlier
sample, contained 69 per cent women. In Rio de Janeiro, women made up around half of the

44
A sense of this background of movement and
migration in the lives of many of Rio’s enslaved is
provided by the tables available of slaves (mainly
women) classified for emancipation under the
national Emancipation Fund in the late 1870s and
early 1880s, large numbers of whom had been
registered only a few years previously in different
parts of the country. Arquivo Geral da Cidade do
Rio de Janeiro (henceforth AGCRJ), Escravidão:
Emancipação (henceforth E:E), Book 6.1.40, 1–3;
Book 6.2.1, 36; 6.2.2, 27–33.
45
On the trade see Robert W. Slenes, ‘The
Demography and Economics of the Brazilian
Slavery: 1850–1888’ (Ph.D., Stanford University,
1976).
46
Richard Graham, ‘Another middle passage?’
in Walter Johnson (ed.), The Chattel Principle:
Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven,
2004), 298–300, 311–13; and Robert Slenes, ‘The
Brazilian internal slave trade, 1850–1888: regional
economies, slave experience and the politics of a
peculiar market’ in Johnson (ed.), The Chattel
Principle, op. cit., 351–16.
47
Roberto Moura, Tia Ciata e a Pequena África
no Rio de Janeiro [Tia Ciata and the Little Africa of
Rio Janeiro] (Rio de Janeiro, 1995 [2nd edn]), 96–
107.
48
Cowling, ‘Matrices of opportunity’, op. cit.,
195–262.
49
Childs, op. cit., 116.
50
For Cuba, see Digna Castañeda, ‘The
woman slave in Cuba during the first half of
the nineteenth century’ in Verene Shepherd,
Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey (eds),
Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical
Perspective (London, 1995), 141–54; and Digna
Castañeda, ‘Demandas judiciales de las esclavas en
el siglo XIX cubano’, Temas, V (January–March
1996), 60–5. For Brazil see A. J. R. Russell-
Wood, ‘‘‘Acts of grace’’: Portuguese monarchs
and their subjects of African descent in eight-
eenth-century Brazil’, Journal of Latin American
Studies, XXXII (2000), 307–32; Kirsten Schultz,
Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy and the
Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–
1821 (New York, 2001), 165–76.
 306 Social History vol. 36 : no. 3
city’s overall slave population in 1872, but like in Havana, they were more concentrated in
particular central urban neighbourhoods, representing 54 per cent of those in Sacramento, and
56 per cent and 57 per cent in São Cristóvão and Glória respectively. At the same time, these
same areas also held high concentrations of free(d) women of colour: 59 per cent in São
Cristóvão, 54 per cent in Glória.51
Interacting and mingling with freed women on a daily basis, enslaved women had a constant
example of what freedom might bring and how it could be achieved, despite illiteracy.
Enslaved people who achieved freedom left ex-owners’ houses where possible, adopting living
arrangements which would help them assuage poverty and marginalization. Indeed, living
separately from owners was achieved by some people in cities even before they became free.52
In Rio, neither Josepha nor one of her fellow ex-slaves, Raymunda Maria da Conceição, who
testified for her, had set foot in the Gonçalves’ house since being freed several years
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previously.53 In Havana, the poor in the growing popular districts beyond the city’s walls often
lived in crowded subdivided buildings rented by the room, with access to a shared patio.54
Groups of women of colour, often all of the same occupation and with one of them listed as
head of household, frequently cohabited.55 Such close cohabitation led to tensions and
conflicts – laundresses, for example, often accused other women of stealing the clothes they
hung to dry on the patio.56 Yet this same proximity at other moments also promoted a
communal approach to claims-making. Clues about these collective experiences can be
gleaned from some of the individually filed claims. In October 1884, the morena Alejandra
Calisto and the pardo José de la Paz Balsa had an exchange of insults in their shared building on
San Miguel street in Havana which led José to make a complaint at the local police station.
The municipal judge who later examined the file threw the case out for lack of evidence, and
sent a judicial official to the shared house on San Miguel to inform the two of the result. But,
reported the official, ‘since they were both out, according to a black woman who said she lived
there and that she was called Luisa Sanchez [sic], I gave her the documents to pass to her

51
For Havana, see ‘Varios padrones de los
esclavos de ambos sexos destinados al servicio
doméstico y sujetos al pago de Capitación’, ANC,
Gobierno Superior Civil, legajo 948, expediente
33528, 1853–4; ‘Planilla correspondiente al Padrón
de Patrocinados de La Habana, año económico de
1881–2’, ANC, ME, legajo 3539, expediente B,
1882. For Rio, see Recenseamento da População do
Municipio Neutro e Provincia de Parana a que se
procedeu em 1 de Agosto de 1872 [Population Census of
the Municipio Neutro and the Province of Parana
produced on the 1st of August of 1872] (Rio de Janeiro,
1872), 58–9.
52
See Ynaê Lopes dos Santos, ‘Além da senzala:
arranjos escravos de moradia no Rio de Janeiro,
1808–1850’ [‘Beyond the Slave Quarters: Slaves’
Living Arrangements in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850’]
(M.A., Universidade de São Paulo, 2006), 90-100.
53
Josepha v. José Gonçalves do Pinho, op. cit.,
25v–26.
54
Marcos Arriaga Mesa and Andrés Delgado
Valdés, ‘Contribución al estudio de la vivienda
pobre en La Habana del siglo XIX: ciudadelas
y accesorias’, Revista de Indias, CCIV (1995), 453–
83.
55
See ‘Padrón de morenos y pardos libres de
la jurisdicción de La Habana’, ANC, ME, legajo
3413, expediente S, 1870. On residence patterns
for 1860s Havana, see Fernando González-
Quiñones, Pilar Pérez-Fuentes Hernández, and
Lola Valverde Lamsfús, ‘Hogares y familias en
los barrios populares de La Habana en el siglo
XIX: una aproximación a través del censo de
1861’, Boletı́n de la Asociación de Demografı́a
Histórica [Bulletin of the Association of Demographic
History], XVI, 2 (1998), 87–133 and Marikay
McCabe, ‘Parameters of the Public: Commercial
and Legal Topographies of Nineteenth-Century
Havana’ (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2003),
135–7.
56
For example, ‘Expediente criminal contra
Belén Carvallo por estafa a la parda Rosenda
Valera’, ANC, ME, legajo 2868, expediente D,
1878.
 August 2011 Women and the abolition of slavery 307
neighbours’. Thus, their neighbour heard about the result of this particular legal case before
those involved did, and they would depend on her to learn the outcome.57 A well-established
daily routine in urban claims-making practices is suggested by the Havana case of black
patrocinada Lucı́a Collazo, who stated in September 1883 that she had been to the provincial
Junta de Patronato ‘for several Saturdays in a row, and they always tell [her] to come back next
Saturday’. Saturdays were perhaps the day hearings were known to take place, or simply a day
when busy working women could snatch a couple of hours off their tasks.58 One observer
remarked how ‘the steps of the palace of Havana, on the very frequent days when an audience
is given, are always full of people of colour who go to the Captain General in person to present
him with their business’.59 Research with the petitions they filed implies that a significant
majority of those waiting on the steps were women. Surely, as they waited, they chatted about
the nature and chances of success of their pleas, building in the process an urban culture of
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claims-making.
Cases like those of Ursula and Josepha allow us to descend to the level of single city streets,
sites where myriad daily exchanges occurred between slaves, slave-owners and freedpeople.
Ursula’s daughters, Francisca and Guadalupe, first made an appeal to the local Junta de Patronato
in Regla in May 1883. Their appeal came at a timely moment as their patrono, D. Simón Batey,
was ill and shortly died, leaving his widow Doña Regla Campos de Batey to continue the
struggle. Slaves or patrocinados were, by now, particularly reluctant to accept transfer to a
relative of the deceased ‘legitimate’ owner. Rather, they assumed that their time as reasonably
enslaved was over.60 The girls stated they had not received the salaries and clothing owed them
under the 1880 patronato law. Doña Regla responded to and defeated the girls’ claim by
drawing on socially constructed knowledge of her own. Two local peddlers testified that she
had, on various occasions, told the girls to choose the clothes they preferred from among their
wares, and paid for them. Another neighbour, Doña Inés Canton, backed the peddlers’
statements up. Her title denoted that she was white, and she shared a surname with the girls’
mother, Ursula, implying this was perhaps probably none other than Ursula’s ex-owner.61
Yet the girls’ belief that Don Simón’s death signalled their freedom seems to have been very
strong. Increasingly desperate letters from Doña Regla alleged that despite the Junta’s decision
against their claim, Francisca and Guadalupe had been periodically absenting themselves
from her house, along with Ursula herself: ‘they are completely insubordinate and disobedient;
their . . . mother having come for them on many occasions, threatening and insulting me . . .
because I refuse to cede to her desires and demands to declare them free of the Patronato’. The
girls and their mother had been spotted together walking around the local streets in open

57
‘Juicio de falta contra la morena Alejandra
Calisto por insultos al pardo José de la Paz Balsa’,
ANC, ME, legajo 3092, expediente Bs, 1884.
58
‘Documento con instancia de Lucı́a Collazo
en queja de la Junta de Patronato de la Habana,
sobre demora de un expediente’, ANC, ME,
legajo 3724, expediente Aa, 1883.
59
José Ferrer de Couto, Los negros en sus diversos
estados y condiciones; tales como son, como se supone que
son, y como deben ser [The Blacks in their Diverse
States and Conditions: As they are, how one supposes
them to be and how they should be] (New York,
1864), 96. Ferrer de Couto, one of the best known
racist defenders of slavery of his time, had an
agenda: he vigorously proclaimed that slaves were
well treated and had excellent chances of manu-
mission. None the less, his evocation of daily
urban routines of claims-making is valuable.
60
On this phenomenon, for Brazil, see Chal-
houb, Visões, op. cit., 110–12.
61
See Michael Zeuske, ‘Hidden markers, open
secrets: on naming, race-marking and race-making
in Cuba’, New West Indian Guide, LXXVI, 3–4
(2002), 211–42.
 308 Social History vol. 36 : no. 3
defiance. Doña Regla soon declared that ‘after what has happened with those patrocinadas and
how disobedient they are [she] cannot continue to have them in her house’ and requested that
they be given licence to seek another patrono. It seems unlikely, however, that anyone in the
local community would want to invest money in the purchase of such rebellious young
women, supported by their freed mother, when the 1880 law had declared a planned end of
the apprenticeship period by 1888. This date was brought forward, in the end, by two years,
with final abolition declared in 1886 – partly, of course, as a result of constant daily
negotiations concerning the issue of freedom and family that were often spearheaded by
women like Ursula.62
A glance at the activities of the neighbours of Ursula and her daughters in these years
suggests the accumulation of considerable local knowledge about the process of claiming
freedom, which surely influenced the actions of mother and daughters. The previous year, a
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black 53-year-old laundress, Teresa Baez, had appeared before the local Junta. Teresa lived on
Santuario street, at number 7, a few doors down from Francisca and Guadalupe. As with the
girls a year later, her owners’ death provoked her claim. Since he had died, she said, ‘she enjoys
complete freedom, since for around the last three years nobody has interfered with her as she
pays nothing to anyone nor does she receive help from anyone.’ Teresa’s appeal was successful;
her freedom was recognized.63 Meanwhile, down the road from Teresa at Santuario 61 lived a
young parda, Juana Méndez, whose free godmother Paulina Perdomo appealed for her
freedom in June 1884.64 In the same household lived patrocinados Gavino and Vicente, whose
mother was granted custody of them a month later.65
In Rio de Janeiro, too, the cramped proximity of urban housing and a critical mass of freed
and enslaved women ensured that the struggle for legal freedom was a collective process. The
poor increasingly lived in overcrowded slum tenements called cortiços (literally meaning
‘beehives’), where close cohabitation ensured daily opportunities to spread news about others’
claims (as well as the diseases that provoked hysteria among urban sanitation commissions).66
Street-by-street emancipation campaigns focused mainly on freeing women. In Brazil – unlike
in Cuba – a national Emancipation Fund was set up under the 1871 law. A municipal fund also
operated in Rio from 1885. These public emancipation funds, as well as those run by many
private abolitionist societies, concentrated on freeing particular streets, blocks or areas.
Overwhelmingly, the funds focused on freeing women.67 Although they never freed
significant numbers, they did involve whole clusters of women and their families living on the
same street in the quest to take advantage of such opportunities for freedom. For example, on

62
Francisca and Guadalupe Criollas [title page
missing], Museo Municipal de Regla (henceforth
MMR), Junta Local de Patronato de Regla (hence-
forth JLPR), legajo 16, expediente 002994, 1883.
63
‘Expediente promovido por la morena Teresa
Baez patrocinada a cargo de los Herederos de Dn
Benito Mateos y Mendo’, MMR, JLPR, legajo 16,
expediente 002984, 1882.
64
‘Expediente promovido por la parda libre
Paulina Perdomo en reclamacion de su ahijada la
menor parda Juana Mendez a cargo de Dn Jorge
Mendez’, MMR, JLPR, legajo 16, expediente
002996, 1884.
65
‘Expediente relativo a la renuncia graciosa que
de los derechos de patronato hace Dn. Jorge
Mendez a favor de la madre de sus patrocinados
Gavino y Vicente criollos’, MMR, JLPR, legajo
16, expediente 002965, 1884.
66
On the campaigns see Sidney Chalhoub,
Cidade febril: cortiços e epidemias na cidade imperial
[Feverish City: Tenements and Epidemics in the
Imperial City] (São Paulo, 1996).
67
On the funds and why they favoured women
see Castilho and Cowling, ‘Funding freedom’,
op. cit.
 August 2011 Women and the abolition of slavery 309
the Rua do Lavradio in central Rio, between 1880 and 1883, fifteen people were classified to
be freed. Eight were adult women and six were their children; one was an adult man. In
March 1886, a further four women on Lavradio were freed, this time through the municipal
fund. The same pattern was repeated on nearby streets. Various slave petitions on the subject
reached Rio’s council, almost all initiated by women.68
Josepha’s case is an excellent example of these collective processes in action. Josepha drew
on a range of local people living on or near the Rua do Catete as her witnesses: a labourer on
public works; her former fellow enslaved women workers; and the partner of one of them,
who had contributed toward the woman’s freedom. Various neighbours had seen Maria
‘dressed in rags and wandering the streets, buying food at the local taverns and quitandas’.69
None of these people had directly witnessed any abuse of the minor within the owner’s
household. Yet they knew all about it, because ‘the slaves of the household say so’.70 One
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described how, recently, the senhora of the household had hit Maria in the face with a slipper.
Asked how he knew, he said ‘it had been told to him by a black slave woman’ of the
household.71 House and street became intimately intermingled, drawing a whole neighbour-
hood into one woman’s dispute. This surely rankled with José Gonçalves de Pinho, whose
private household authority over slaves and dependants thus became the subject of local gossip
and questioning.72 Josepha’s claim to custody of her daughter was formed by multiple local
voices, active participants in an urban culture of claims-making. At the centre of this culture
were, more often than not, the legal battles fought by women like her.

CONCLUSIONS
On 7 August 1886, local judge Joaquim José de Oliveira Andrade reached a decision about
Josepha’s long-running custody battle. He argued that the ‘said minor’s mother, who is
recently freed and is living with her lover, is certainly not in a condition to give her a good
upbringing and other attentions’. Maria, he ruled, was living happily with her mother’s ex-
owners.73 Hence he refused Josepha custody, although one wonders whether Maria would, in
practice, continue to go to her mother and other neighbours for food, money and emotional
support.74

68
For slaves freed through the Rio Livro de
Ouro fund see AGCRJ, Boletim da Câmara
Municipal (henceforth Boletim) [Bulletin of the
Municipal Council], 29 July 1885, 29; 10 September
1885, 115–17; 5 December 1885, 132; 18 March
1886, 122; 16 September 1886, 89–93; January
1887, 3–4; 12 December 1887. See also AGCRJ,
E:E, Book 6.1.41, 29 Ju1y 1886, 74; 7 September
1887, 44. For slaves in Rio qualifying for freedom
through the national fund see AGCRJ, E:E,
6.1.40, 1–3; 6.2.1, 36; 6.2.2, 27–33. For an
example of a petition for freedom through the
funds see Francisco Pinto da Silva on behalf of
Rita, parda, to president of municipal council, 12
October 1885, AGCRJ, E:E, Book 6.1.61, 45.
69
Josepha v. José Gonçalves de Pinho, op. cit.,
29. A quitanda was a small stall selling food on the
streets. Quitandeiras were often women of African
descent.
70
ibid., 12.
71
ibid., 31v.
72
On power and patriarchy in the lives of
domestic servants and households in Rio see
Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The
Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-
Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge, 1988).
73
His decision was influenced by the fact that
Maria, almost certainly under pressure from the
Gonçalves since she gave her testimony only in
their presence, had stated she was happy living
with them. Josepha v. José Gonçalves de Pinho,
op. cit., 15v, 50.
74
ibid., 50v.
 310 Social History vol. 36 : no. 3
Ursula’s case, in Havana, does not contain the final outcome. Yet while in neither case was
the road easy or certain, each story reveals how women like Ursula and Josepha, living in the
capital cities of the last American territories to retain slavery, lived and shaped the process of
gradual abolition in specific ways that deserve our attention. Their ability to make particular
legal arguments based on the relationship between legal transition and the womb; their use of
language about the rights of maternity produced in a broad Atlantic discursive space; and their
involvement in intricate, female-centred urban networks of information and support are just
some of the themes that make their stories worth telling together, despite the fact that their
lives were lived some 4000 miles apart.
In order to appreciate each of these elements of the stories, we need an approach to the
telling which is as multifaceted and complex as were these women’s lives. The commonalities
between their stories may help shed light on how gender underpinned arguments and
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strategies for ending slavery in other Atlantic contexts, or on the particular responses to
enslavement of African-descended women in cities across the African diaspora in the
Americas.75 While the similarity of the transition process in Brazil and Cuba led to particular
parallels between these two cases in the 1870s and 1880s, we should not be surprised to find
other broad patterns in women’s contributions to legal manumission across other slaveholding
societies and periods.
Yet each woman’s trajectory was also shaped by profoundly local, even parochial, details
which are equally worthy of our consideration. Such details might fall by the wayside in a
strictly ‘comparative’ framework, concerned with ‘similarities and differences’, just as an
Atlantic lens might pick up connections between Madrid and Havana but miss gossip between
the neighbours of Santuario street. The very complexities of these women’s dealings with the
law can also help us, as historians, to resist the dichotomies to which abolition studies have
sometimes become reduced, helping us to think beyond the competing claims to ‘heroism’ of
slave agents versus white abolitionists, for example. Each woman took important initiatives in
order to change her own life circumstances and those of people around her in ways that,
cumulatively, had an important impact on a broader historical process. Yet neither woman
operated independently. The very act of making a legal petition involved negotiation,
patronage, networks of information and support – among slaveholders, lawyers and others in
the local community as well as among neighbouring enslaved and free(d) people of colour.
The records left to us by this process also defy simple categorizations: while framed at every
stage by relations of power, they are also syncretic, producing new narratives of slavery,
freedom and the very meanings of these terms which are the product of many voices.76

75
Keila Grinberg has observed how ‘despite
different legal traditions, the destinies of discrete
groups of Africans and their descendants in
cities . . . were remarkably similar . . . these slaves
succeeded in creating spaces that allowed them
to change their own social and legal conditions,
paving the way for the subsequent abolition of
slavery in all of the Americas’. Rosalyn Terborg-
Penn has highlighted the value of studying women
of African descent across different societies,
cultures and historical moments. These approaches
could be fruitfully combined in understanding the
lives of African-descended women in cities in the
Americas. Grinberg, ‘Freedom suits’, op. cit., 78;
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, ‘Through an African
feminist theoretical lens: viewing Caribbean
women’s history cross-culturally’ in Shepherd
et al. (eds), op. cit., 4, 9.
76
Wlamyra Albuquerque, in a recent study,
reminds us that Brazil at the moment of abolition
was ‘a society immersed in a crisis, and hence,
marked by conflicts and contradictions’. Her
approach combines the actions and perspectives
of a cast of actors ranging from statesman Rui
 August 2011 Women and the abolition of slavery 311
Having attained legal freedom, Josepha and Ursula would each seek to invest their new legal
status with concrete meanings.77 Women’s goals and strategies were surely shared by the men
who were their husbands, lovers, fathers and sons, but just as enslavement acted upon men and
women in different ways, so we can expect their understandings of freedom’s promises to
differ. After abolition, women would continue to be denied full political citizenship in both
Brazil and Cuba for many years to come, while combined sex and race discrimination would
hamper their quest to improve their own and their families’ fortunes.78 Women like Ursula
and Josepha, whose struggles had collectively made major contributions toward carving out
freedom in Havana and Rio de Janeiro, would struggle with these problems using the tools
gained in the emancipation process, in order to negotiate and define life in urban freedom for
themselves and their families.
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University of Nottingham

Barbosa to black abolitionists, members of carnival
clubs and former slaves, helping us away from – in
the words of Maria Pereira Cunha – dichotomous
understandings of abolition as either generously
granted or fraudulent and hollow. See Wlamyra
Albuquerque, O jogo da dissimulação: abolição e
cidadania negra no Brasil [The Game of Dissimulation:
Abolition and Black Citizenship in Brazil] (São
Paulo, 2009), 43; and Maria Clementina Pereira
Cunha, ‘Apresentação’, op. cit., 20–1.
77
For some reflections on the ‘meanings of
freedom’ see Rebecca J. Scott, ‘Tres vidas, una
guerra: Rafael Iznaga, Bárbara Pérez y Gregoria
Quesada entre la emancipación y la ciudadanı́a’ in
Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura
Cubana Juan Marinello (ed.), Historia y memoria:
sociedad, cultura y vida cotidiana en Cuba 1878–1917
[History and Memory: Society, Culture and Daily Life
in Cuba, 1878–1917] (Havana, 2003), 83–100.
78
See Olı́via Gomes da Cunha, ‘Criadas para
servir: domesticidade, intimidade e retribuição’ in
Olı́via Maria Gomes da Cunha and Flávio dos
Santos Gomes (eds), Quase-cidadão: histórias e
antropologias da pós-emancipação no Brasil [Almost
Citizens: Histories and Anthropologies of Postemanci-
pation Brazil] (Rio de Janeiro, 2007), 377–417 and
June Hahner, ‘Women and work in Brazil, 1850–
1920: a preliminary investigation’ in Dauril Alden
and Warren Dean (eds), Essays Concerning the
Socioeconomic History of Brazil and Portuguese India
(Gainesville, 1977), 103.