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chapter 9 Ana Paulinha de Queirós, Joaquina da Costa, andTheir Neighbors: Free Women of Color as Household Heads in Rural Bahia (Brazil), 1835 B. J. Barickman and Martha Few In 1835 Ana Paulinha [sic] de Queirós, a sixty-year-old, never formally married, freeborn woman of mixed African and European ancestry (“parda”), found herself heading a fairly prosperous household in São Gonçalo dos Campos,a largely rural parish in the region known as the Bahian Recôncavo in the province (now state) of Bahia in Northeastern Brazil. The census takers who visited the household in that year listed Ana Paulinha’s occupation as “farming” (lavoura),which in São Gonçalo dos Campos almost certainly meant that she grew tobacco for export in combination with food crops for home consumption and for sale in local markets.Ana Paulinha’s household included her thirty-six-year-old unmarried son as well as two male slaves and one female slave. That same year,a few miles away,local census takers in the sugar-producing parish of Santiago do Iguape came upon what was no doubt the much more modest residence of Joaquina da Costa, a fifty-year-old, Brazilian-born single black woman (“preta”) and former slave.A laundress by trade, Joaquina shared her household with Raimundo da Rocha,also a freed Brazilian-born black slave, whose recorded occupation was “beggar” and who was surely very old—so old, in fact, that the census takers listed his age at an implausible 120.1 As non-“white” free women,Ana Paulinha de Queirós and Joaquina da Costa were not by any means anomalies in late-colonial and early-nineteenth-century Brazil.Nor would it have been particularly unusual at the time that they headed their own households. In contrast with the southern United States and several other slaveholding regions of the Americas, free women of color in Brazil did not represent a small minority within either the overall female population or 170 b. j. barickman and martha few the population of African ancestry. On the contrary, freeborn and freed blacks and mulattos already accounted for perhaps one-fourth of Brazil’s total population in the early 1800s; by 1872, the year of the country’s first national census, they outnumbered both whites and slaves.2 Nevertheless, free women of color have seldom been the subject of specific historical research in the otherwise large and growing literature about women in colonial and nineteenth-century Brazil.The general lack of such research may be due in part to difficulties in identifying free non-“white” women in the sources. It may also reflect the fact that, until recently, historical research on Brazil has tended to focus on either race or gender rather than on the intersections of the two.3 Yet they deserve attention—if for no other reason than research on free women of color can reveal much about how racial and gender hierarchies intersected in nineteenth-century Brazil. This chapter, based chiefly on two manuscript censuses, examines freeborn and freedwomen in early-nineteenth-century Brazil, with particular focus on women such as Ana Paulinha de Queirós and Joaquina da Costa who served as household heads in rural areas of the Bahian Recôncavo during the mid-1830s. The Recôncavo at that time ranked as one of the oldest, most important slaveholding regions of not only Brazil but also the Americas.4 Our largely exploratory work with the two censuses demonstrates that, by the 1830s, free women of color headed a significant share of all households in the Bahian countryside . In large part responsible for their own survival and also for the wellbeing of their households,these free non-“white” women found and created for themselves opportunities within the slave-based economy of the rural Recôncavo.The households they headed often had access to land and controlled other productive resources; in some cases they even owned slaves. But the censuses also suggest that free women of color in the Bahian Recôncavo, whatever measure of autonomy and authority they may have enjoyed as household heads, did not escape hierarchies based on race, color, gender, and ethnicity that permeated Brazilian society at the time.Indeed,for most free non-“white” women, household headship went hand in hand with poverty and insecurity. The two censuses used in this chapter are among the few surviving results of a failed attempt to carry out a general...

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