Black Women's Labor and Property Ownership in Rural Brazil, 1860-1930

A surprising number of Black women had access to land in nineteenth and twentieth century southern Bahia, on which to grow either domestic food crops or cacao for export. As the export economy expanded after 1880, they had increasing difficulties in maintaining control of that land, even though abolition meant that they were free to do so. Sex was not necessarily the impediment that Black women faced to establishing and maintaining their access to land. Brazil’s community property regime and equal partible inheritance system meant that legally married free women shared the rights to property with their husbands. Women who were not married in the Catholic Church prior to 1889 and under civil law thereafter, on the other hand, did not, and neither did their children unless legitimized by the father. Most women of African descent fell into this latter category. Consequently, on Brazil’s smallholdings, although women and children labored alongside common-law husbands and fathers, many did not have any claim to the farm or its produce. If legally married, they had particular difficult defending their rights to property if their husbands died, because they were required to interact with representatives of an extremely hierarchical State and, in particular, court system. Based on documents from Brazil’s cacao area, this paper looks particularly at the experiences of property owning women of African descent. It seeks to establish the extent to which race was a particular impediment to Black women’s control of property and examine further the Brazilian concept of racial democracy.