Desengomando a liberdade: trabalhadoras negras do serviço doméstico e suas agências em Juiz de Fora (1887-1892)

Abstract

This dissertation has the purpose to analyze how black domestic workers in Juiz de Fora between 1887 and 1892 created ways to agency their freedom and autonomy in the World of Work of the Domestic Service. These workers created strategies to confront the forms of control developed by public institutions and the police, as well as being present in black organizational forms in the city. Therefore, the dissertation will analyze how domestic workers were represented and seen by juiz-forana society in the final years of slavery and in the immediate post-abolition, in the newspapers “O Pharol”, “Diário de Minas” and “Diário da Manhã”, from the perspective of the domestic service crisis, a phenomenon present in Brazil in the last decades of the 19th century, when slavery was dismantled and domestic service was regulated. Furthermore, it investigates how the process of regulating the leasing of domestic services in the city took place, through the Registrations Book for Servants to Serve, created by the City Council of Juiz de Fora. The content of the book shows how part of the servant to serve class was organized and, above all, makes visible their resistance to joining that system of political and police monitoring of the free black population. Finally, it will examine some forms of agency, confrontation and resistance of washerwomen and cooks in their quotidian and organizational experiences. Their experiences, crossed by the intersectionality between race, class and gender, shaped specific forms of struggle against exclusion, exploitation and, above all, to undo what society understood as domestic service and especially about black female domestic workers.