Gender and race in the free domestic service in Salvador in the end of nineteenth century: the emergence of a fatally segmented class

Abstract

On 1887, a rule to discipline domestic labor in Salvador was published by the City Council. This rule provided that all the servants were to be enrolled in the Police Department, which resulted in 897 registrations, with extremely rich data, containing various personal information about the workers, accompanied by a thorough physical description. This allowed the analysis of possible gender, class and racial cleavages within the category of servants, whose results are presented in this article. The most common profession, also the one present in most of the houses or establishments, were the cooks, harboring in this profession a great number of black women. Despite of some professions were occupied by men and women there were a strong sexual differentiation in most of the labor categories. These results also reflect what is observed today in the general characterization of domestic labor in Brazil: black women confined to the kitchen work, while mainly white men gave rise to their independent labor categories, nowadays detached from the concept of domestic work.