Training for the Future: Black Girlhood and the School for Little Mothers, Bahia, Brazil 1930s-1940s

In Salvador da Bahia, Brazil of the 1930s and 1940s, dozens of girls attended household and childrearing education classes, called the School for Little Mothers, just as their counterparts did in several countries around the world.  These leagues originated in the US, but it did not take long for social reformists in many regions to adopt the idea of preparing girls for their assumed future roles as mothers and wives.  In Brazil, a private organization called the Bahian League against Infant Mortality offered their first Little Mothers’ classes in 1937.  While Little Mothers’ Leagues fit within a gendered cultural logic that equated femininity with mothering, in Bahia and in Brazil generally, childrearing and household service were also racialized occupations.  Women of color overwhelmingly worked as domestics, surviving and raising their own children within a society that systematically excluded them from other possibilities.  And many of these adult women began their (arduous) working lives as mere girls.  Black and brown girlhood in Brazil was marked by poorly paid or unpaid labor in households of privilege.  Expanding on this history, my contribution to the session proposes that Little Mothers’ classes signified something specific in this context.  My aim is to consider the ways that reproductive and productive labor conflated when girls of color were the primary targets of “training” in childrearing and household chores.  This reflection on Brazilian girlhood follows from my book Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945 (University of Texas Press, 2016).