Journalhttp://jfh.sagepub.

com/
of Family History

The Puzzling Contradictions of Child Labor, Unemployment, and Education in Brazil

Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof
Journal of Family History 1998 23: 225
DOI: 10.1177/036319909802300302

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://jfh.sagepub.com/content/23/3/225

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Journal of Family History can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://jfh.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://jfh.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

>> Version of Record - Jul 1, 1998

What is This?

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
THE PUZZLING CONTRADICTIONS
OF CHILD LABOR, UNEMPLOYMENT,
AND EDUCATION IN BRAZIL

Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof

Hugh Cunningham recently argued that in nineteenth-century Europe, social con-

trol was the major concern of authorities promoting both child labor and public
education. This article examines this thesis for nineteenth-century São Paulo, Bra-
zil, using Portuguese legislation concerning orphans, cases of tutorship, criminal
records, records of child labor from industries, and annual reports of São Paulo
primary teachers. The evidence shows that child labor was regarded as educa-
tional both in the moral sense and to acquire skills for children age seven and older
and that employers also valued child labor. The efforts to develop public educa-
tion, on the other hand, were hampered by the resistance of parents to sending
their children to school rather than sending them to work or using them for chores
at home. While social control was definitely an underlying agenda of elites in their
ideas for popular education (since it was seen to prevent crime), the contribution
of child labor to household economy was much more important from the perspec-
tive of average Brazilian families.

The complicated relationship between household economy, child labor, the history of
industrialization, and the history of public education has been insufficiently examined
in any context. Studies of child labor seldom consider the phenomena from the per-
spective of the nonelite family and the household economy. Yet, this is surely the per-
spective that most influenced whether children worked.
Within the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil, children appeared
in legal documents and reports as workers and apprentices in protoindustrial house-
hold workshops, in textile and iron factories, as clerks in retail shops, as agricultural
workers alongside their parents and siblings, and as domestic household laborers
inside their homes and especially in the households of others.’ Such evidence strongly
suggests that productive work was commonly viewed as an appropriate activity for

Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof is a professor of history and director of Latin American studies at the University of
Kansas. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley In 1976. Her book Household
Economy and Urban Development: Sdo Paulo 1765 to 1836 was pubhshed in 1986. She has publrshed exten-
sively on the history of women and the family in Brazil and Latin America. She is completing a book on the
history of the family In colonial Latin Amenca.

Journal of Family History, Vol 23 No 3, July 1998 225-239

© 1998 Sage l’ubhcauons, Inc

225

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
226

nonelite children and that children of the popular classes were important sources of
family labor from an early age.
At the same time, from a comparative perspective, quantitative studies of propor-
tions of European children productively employed both inside and outside of the home
cast considerable doubt on the idea that the majority of nonelite nineteenth-century
children ages five to fifteen were actually productively employed. Based on these find-
ings, British scholar Hugh Cunningham has argued that the greatest societal concern in
Europe at the time was not the employment of children of the popular classes but,
rather, their unemployment and therefore the danger they posed to the social order.2
Cunningham further contends that the development of public education did not occur
in competition with child employment but, rather, as a solution for the unemployment
of children and therefore as a means of crime prevention, job training and social con-
trol. This provocative thesis with respect to Europe raises parallel theoretical questions
for the history of child labor and education everywhere. Although the history of child-
hood with respect to the industrialization process no doubt differed in important ways
depending on context, there are also important similarities. Widespread use of child
and adolescent labor in preindustrial, protoindustrial, and manufacturing contexts is
one of those. Labor market considerations must have also affected the economic sig-
nificance of child labor. For example, I argue here that the decline and abolition of
slave labor in Brazil effected the demand for child labor in late-nineteenth-century Sao
Paulo.3
Cunningham’s argument for the priority of the social control purpose for both labor
and public education makes eminent sense from a governmental or institutional per-
spective. However, it begs the question of whether public education was a threat to
family income for the popular classes. In other words, public education may not have
been seen by authorities as existing in competition with child employment (since both
promoted public order). Nevertheless, such competition may have been a significant
problem from the perspective of the family economy. In effect, employment of chil-
dren (including both the work experience and the income provided) operated as an
opportunity cost for education. In this article, I will use Cunningham’s problematic to
look at the relationship of child labor and the development of public education in Sao
Paulo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The evidence for child labor in nineteenth-century Sao Paulo, Brazil, mirrors that
for European nations in the same period. That is, children are listed in censuses as
apprentices, laborers, and domestic workers, but the proportion of children ages five to
fifteen known to have been productively employed (as measured by household-level
censuses) never exceeded 20 percent of children in that population cohort.’ At the
same time, official statements concerning child labor suggest that crime prevention
was a major incentive for encouraging child employment, thus providing support for

Cunningham’s argument in the Brazilian context.5 In the case of education, annual

enrollment records submitted by individual teachers in Sao Paulo schools in the late
nineteenth century indicate considerable indifference and/or resistance to school
attendance among the popular classes. Not only were enrollments very low relative to
the school-age population, but levels of absences were high. In many cases, the expla-
nation given for the high levels of absences was that the students were needed at home
for household or agricultural labor.
In considering Cunningham’s thesis, I will argue first that child labor was important
to household economies in the popular classes of Sao Paulo and to aggregate

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
 227

household wages for children working outside their families’ homes. This employ-
ment was not only accepted as normal and desirable in the population but was also
encouraged by Brazilian authorities. This argument will be based on evidence that
child labor (for children ages seven and older) was widely used and that employers felt
such labor was important for production; evidence that child labor (also viewed as
&dquo;education&dquo; by Brazilian authorities) was seen as appropriate and healthy for children
ages seven and older of the popular classes, both by members of those classes and by
Brazilian elites; and evidence of popular resistance to public education in the nine-
teenth century because of the loss of child labor or child wages to the family, which
indicates that child labor had more than a social control function as viewed by the
popular classes. Here I should note that while Cunningham never argued that child
labor was unimportant to the European household economy, he also did not recognize
its importance. The purpose of this argument is to bring the perspective of nonelite
families to the problematic of child labor and the development of public education in
Brazil.
Second, I will argue (in agreement this time with Cunningham’s thesis for Europe)
that there was also a social control agenda operating in the treatment of children by
Brazilian authorities. To support that argument, I will cite evidence that (1) both efforts
to provide tutors for orphans and the work expected of those orphans were seen by
authorities as modes of social control, and that (2) the idea of education itself
expressed in legislation included the inculcation of good work habits in children, as
well as a respect for authority.

THE ECONOMIC SIGNIFICANCE OF CHILD LABOR

IN EIGHTEENTH- AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRAZIL

The population of Sao Paulo in the late eighteenth century included mixtures of
Portuguese, Tupi, and free blacks as well as African and Creole slaves. Seminomadic
residence patterns in conjunction with slash-and-burn agriculture and domestic
processing and manufacture of food products, implements, clothes, and furniture were
characteristic of the household economies. Production was primarily for the use of the
producing household and its kinfolk and neighbors, with little monetary exchange.
Although the village of Sao Paulo was officially declared a city in 1765, it was not at
that time an urban area in terms of either population density or economic activities.
Sao Paulo’s isolation from the coast due to the Serra do Mar and no real road pass-
able by carts until 1820 left the Paulistanos with little access to imported goods and lit-
tle hope of contributing to exports. Occupations reported to the militia captains who
took the yearly censuses often included several for one head of household. For exam-
ple, a merchant might also be a colonel in the militia and have a sugar fazenda or raise
cattle. A household headed by a widow might raise cotton and both spin and weave
cotton for sale, probably incorporating several unrelated adolescent children into the
household as part of the labor force. Both households would also grow basic food
crops for household consumption. The total population of the district of Sao Paulo may
be estimated at about twenty thousand in 1777, and growing to about thirty thousand
by 1872, though changes in the geographical definition of the district substantially
complicate that calculation.
Real urban differentiation began to develop by 1802, after a public marketplace was
established in 1788 and when subsistence agriculture had almost entirely disappeared

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
228

from what became the urban center of Sdo Paulo. Urban residents were involved in
commerce, artisan activities, and textile production, with major dependence on the
market for food products. Rural households in 1802 did not develop specialized crops
but did produce surpluses sufficient for the needs of the urban population. Typically,
each rural household produced beans, manioc flour, rice, and rum, as well as raising
pigs, chickens, and cattle, a pattern that had disappeared in favor of crop specialization
by 1836. The agricultural export economy developed after 1836, along with a substan-
tial concentration of the slave population in the sugar and coffee plantations. The
declining availability of slaves in Brazil resulting from the British opposition to the
slave trade and its cessation by 1850 led to a labor crisis in the expanding coffee
business.
While census manuscripts for Sao Paulo note occasional occupations for children,
such as apprentice, clerk, or textile worker, these are not the majority. However, there
are compelling reasons for believing that child labor was important for families in the

popular classes. In rural peasant households, both anthropological and historical evi-
dence indicate the universal use of children. Children accompanied parents in their
tasks often as early as age four or five and by the age of six or seven were expected to
help with domestic tasks and were allowed access to household tools. Assimilation
into the household workforce was gradual, paralleling the development of the child’s
strength and skills. Working beside his or her parents, the child learned how to plant
beans, corn, and manioc; how to work the soil; and how to care for the animals. More
subtle knowledge concerning appropriate times for the planting of different crops, how
to choose the best soils, and how to manufacture domestic utensils was also acquired
by age nine or ten.6Slaves were also an important source of labor in both urban and
rural Sdo Paulo, as approximately 50 percent of households possessed at least one
slave in 1765. Thus, slaves were used even by households of the popular classes. How-
ever, less than 10 percent of households had as many as four slaves, meaning that 90
percent of households relied primarily on household labor, including that of children.’
In Sao Paulo in this period, it was common for family members to work alongside their
two or three slaves in the fields.
Documents concerning individual cases of child labor elucidate ways in which chil-
dren were used in the labor force as well as attitudes of employers concerning its
importance. For example, a coffee planter in Campinas in 1859 made a criminal com-
plaint against a Portuguese coffee worker (colono) because the latter’s wife and
daughter had moved away from the plantation. The planter argued that the worker’s
contract specified that neither the worker nor any member of his family was allowed to
take any other employment or to move away from the plantation without the consent of
the owner. The complaint makes it clear that the labor of the worker’s young daughter
was seen as important to the plantation labor force.8
The Ipanema Iron Foundry was another substantial user of child labor in the rural
context.9 On 16 July 1820, the director of the foundry complained that Joze Soares no
longer brought his two sons, ages ten and eleven, with him to work in charcoal produc-
tion. Soares responded that he had apprenticed his two boys with a cabinetmaker to
prepare them for better careers. Since the boys had already been working in charcoal
production for several years, the director felt betrayed. What remains unclear from the
documentation is whether Soares’s sons’ labor had been paid separately from his own
or whether the three had been paid as a family unit, as in the case of coffee workers dis-

cussed above.’°

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
 229

One striking characteristic of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sdo Paulo house-

holds was the high proportion of children and adolescents living in urban households
other than those of their parents. Several historians have independently argued that
household members identified in censuses as agregados or unrelated members actu-
ally provided some form of household labor or economic support.&dquo; In many cases,
these individuals are simply identified in the census manuscripts as agregados. How-
ever, at times an agregado might also be listed as textile worker, laundress, domestic
servant, or simply as laborer (lavrador, which might also mean farm laborer). Anthro-
pologists looking at the common practice of child adoption in the twentieth century
also agree that these children are principally seen as a source of labor for the adopting
families. 12
For the city of Sao Paulo, the proportion of household members who were agrega-
dos increased from 4.7 percent in 1765 to 20.7 percent in 1802, and then to 26 percent in
1836, not including those agregados also identified as kin. 13 These data reinforce the
finding of Eni de Mesquita Samara that the presence of agregados in households
became more important within urban settings in the nineteenth century. In her
research, Alzira de Arruda Campos demonstrated that the agregado population in Sdo
Paulo altered from 1765, when it was predominantly composed of white persons, many
of them kin, to 1813, when the mulatto population, which was mostly unrelated, came
to predominate. In the same period of time, the age structure of the agregado element
also changed. In the late eighteenth century, the majority of agregados were younger
than ten years old; by 1802 (and continuing in 1813), the age composition had altered so
that agregados were predominantly between the ages of eleven and twenty-nine.’a
The increasing age and darker complexion of the agregado population (mostly in
households headed by whites) strongly supports the thesis that agregados in Sao Paulo
by 1813 were seen as household laborers. Both the dominant Brazilian ideology of
race and class and the notion that lower-class children seven years and older should
work support this thesis. Agregados in this period were increasingly used as labor (as
compared to being primarily a form of foster parenting in the eighteenth century). Thiss
is the same period in which the proportion of slaves in the urban population and the
number of slaves per urban household declined dramatically as slaves became more
valuable on the sugar and coffee plantations. This increase in agregados may well have
been a response to the shortage of slaves for urban household labor.&dquo; Proportions of
agregados also increased in rural households in Sdo Paulo over the same period,
though less dramatically than in urban areas.
Scholars have documented household labor exchanges of children and adolescents
in Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’6 The Sdo Paulo data
suggests a parallel move of children between household that no doubt was economi-
cally useful for both giving and receiving households but also was probably seen as a
means of socialization and education for children, particularly when moves were pre-

dominantly hypergamous. Living and working in a household of equal or better class

provided circumstances propitious to the development of good manners and working
habits, as well as the creation of strong social bonds with the family in question.
In urban nineteenth-century Sao Paulo, the clustering of preteen and teenage male
agregados in houses of craftsmen and retail merchants suggests that these young men
were living in an apprenticeship situation.&dquo; For a similar period, the presence of ten-,

twelve-, and fourteen-year-old clerks in retail merchants’ households in Rio de

Janeiro, some of whom received only room and board in their first year, provides more

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
230

specific information on one of these forms of semiapprenticeship. 18 Young girls were

often sent to work as domestic servants and to be trained in &dquo;manners&dquo; in urban house-
holds of &dquo;good&dquo; families, often a formal agreement that included a salary to be paid to
the girls’ families.
Children also commonly made up as much as one-third of the labor force in textile
factories in Rio de Janeiro and Sdo Paulo in the late nineteenth century, including many
who began work at age eight or nine. Stanley Stein described the recruitment of textile
workers from orphanages and founding homes in the 1850s and 1860s. Children of
lower-class families were also hired, often along with other family members. Factories
provided housing, food, clothing, and training in crafts and mechanical skills for work-
ers. Newspapers of the time commented favorably on the use of child labor &dquo;to prevent
’idleness’ at an age where character is forming and regular habits of industry can be
acquired.&dquo; 19
Attitudes toward nonelite child labor in preindustrial Sao Paulo were so widespread
and naturalized that they were seldom expressed anywhere. An exception to this rule is
the legislation concerning the treatment of orphaned and abandoned children.2° This
legislation makes it clear that children ages seven and older were expected to work,
that this work was an important part of their education, and that such work should also
be remunerated. Orphans and legal cases involving children or disabled persons came
under the jurisdiction of the Juiz dos Orphaos (Court of the Orphans), established by
Portuguese law.2’ This court protected the property rights of minors and the welfare of
propertyless children who lacked one or more parents. In fact, any legal case involving
children and their rights might be brought before the Juiz dos Orphaos. In general, a
father could almost always be named tutor for his children, while a mother was named
only while she maintained a &dquo;chaste widowhood&dquo; and a reputation for honor. The state
made provisions to place men in charge of the heirs’ possessions whenever the mother
appeared unfit to do so. In the case of poor orphans, the state was concerned that they
not become &dquo;social problems&dquo; and that they learn the value of work and how to ensure
their own livelihood when they reached adulthood. That nonelite children in this situa-
tion would work was taken for granted, but the court tried to be sure the child both
received an education and was awarded a salary in recognition of his or her economic
contribution.
The law provided that children had the right to a salary from the age of seven and
that such salary could even be collected at the time of the child’s majority after the
death of the foster parent or guardian. The salary was to increase with age, with boys
always receiving higher salaries than what girls received at equivalent ages. A young
girl (rapariga) received one salary for ages seven through eleven and another salary
from the age of twelve to sixteen. For a boy (moco), one salary was to be paid from
seven to fourteen and a higher salary after age fourteen. In general, the salary was

deposited with the municipal treasury to be given to the individual when he or she mar-
ried or became a legal adult. This legislation was written in the colonial period but con-
tinued to be frequently cited in the rulings of the Juiz dos Orphaos during the nine-
teenth century and until the civil code of 1916. The legislation makes it clear that
orphans were expected to work in their foster households to earn their keep. 22
The enormous documentation of the Juiz dos Orphaos includes many examples of
work contracts made up for orphans or children of poor families who were going to live
and work in the home of a tutor assigned by the court or with someone contracted to
provide the apprenticeship opportunity.23 There are also many cases of applications to

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
 231

become tutor submitted by persons interested in a particular child.

In these applica-
tions, arguments included that the child had resident father, that the mother was
no

poor and/or immoral, that the petitioner had some relation to the child of kinship or rit-
ual kinship, that the petitioner could provide an important education or training for the
child, and/or that the petitioner would pay a salary to the child. The large number of
these applications in the last half of the nineteenth century and the competition
between would-be tutors in many cases suggests that orphans were being seen as an
important source of potential household labor in this period.24
Free public education was mandated in 1821 for all Brazilian citizens, though it is
notable that vocational arguments cannot be found among the justifications offered by
legislators and governors. Brazilian school enrollment lagged far behind that of the
United States and Europe in the nineteenth century. Slow progress in Sao Paulo educa-
tion by the 1830s was partly blamed on high levels of absenteeism for those enrolled,
which often exceeded 40 percent. 25 Enrollments themselves only included a very small
fraction (from 5 to 7 percent at most) of school-age children in any district by 1878.26
&dquo;The extreme poverty of the parents who have insufficient means to be able to send
their children to school&dquo; was a frequent lament of primary school teachers in their
annual reports. 27
However, even more than poverty, what the teachers perceived as the &dquo;indifference&dquo;
(desleixo) of the parents to education was reported to be the greatest obstacle to pri-
mary education. This indifference might be understood as parents from the popular
classes not understanding or believing in the importance of education for their chil-
dren. Very likely, most Brazilian parents (compared to those in the United States, for
example) did not value education as a road to social mobility. Alternatively, indiffer-
ence might be interpreted as giving a lower priority to education for their children than

they did for their children as workers. In other words, these parents believed that the
opportunity cost for family economies represented by education was simply too high.
The teachers complained that it was impossible to teach more than a minimal amount
in each subject since the parents left their children in school only a short time before
taking them out to perform some kind of work at home.28 In 1864, primary teacher
Celestino Jose de Oliveira of Penha, Sdo Paulo, reported that he made a great effort to
improve school attendance but he could not succeed given &dquo;the great need that the
families had of their children’s help on the farms, especially at the time of planting. ,,29
This first section focused on the economic importance of child labor for the house-
hold economies of the popular classes. It shows that such labor was common in the late
eighteenth century and even grew in the late nineteenth century with the decline of
slavery. The competition to become tutors of poor children particularly indicates the
general interest in child labor by the late nineteenth century. In addition, parents
showed resistance to leaving their children in school because of the value of their work
to the family economies.

CHILD LABOR AND PUBLIC EDUCATION

AS SOCIAL CONTROL
This section will present evidence supporting the argument that social control, or
crime prevention, was the predominant (or a very important) motivation for Brazilian
authorities in dealing with orphans, child labor, and the promotion of public education.
While the first section took the perspective of the nonelite household and its economy,

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
232

this section will take the larger view of society as well as elite notions of order,
progress, and the ethic of the working poor.
The language used in individual petitions of would-be tutors as well as Portuguese
legislation conveyed the view that child employment (particularly in someone else’s
household) was an appropriate form of education. This perspective supports the idea
that child labor in Brazil was a means of social control or of encouraging children of
the popular classes to internalize the work habits and values of the elite.&dquo;
The ideology written into Portuguese legislation concerning orphans as well as the
cases presented to the Juiz dos Orphaos provide insight into how this social control

strategy functioned in terms of tutorship and apprenticeship contracts. Royal decrees

further explicated appropriate policies with respect to orphans. This legislation made it
clear that the most important goal of the crown was that tutors be found for all orphans
and abandoned children, regardless of class. 31 The provision of tutors for poor orphans
was seen as a means of avoiding future crime.32
Tutors were told that wards should be instructed in the craft of the ward’s prefer-
ence.33 However, if it were not possible to find an appropriate craftsman or merchant to
be a tutor, the crown specified that orphans could be distributed among poor farmers.
Finally, in the case of insufficient tutors who could teach a craft and/or pay a salary, the
tutors might be allowed not to pay salary until their wards reached twelve years of age.
In that case, the tutors would only be obligated to provide education, room, board, and
clothing. It was further stipulated that wards to the age of twelve should be taught to
read and write, regardless of their poverty-a requirement that was frequently ignored
in practice.3a
Education was the most important service that a tutor must provide to a ward. How-
ever, the definition of education was unclear and variable. Basically, it seems to have
meant that a child should be placed in a domestic situation in which he or she could
acquire skills and manners useful for a constructive life and, not incidentally, to an
ordered society. There was often little concern that children in this situation attend
school, and particularly in the case of young nonelite girls, the situation of a domestic
servant was construed as a form of education. In other words, &dquo;education&dquo; was fre-
quently a form of apprenticeship that also functioned as a form of cheap labor for the
tutor. This labor was also deemed as worthy of a salary for children seven and older.
The accumulated salary moneys would be given to the ward at the time of his or her
majority and could potentially serve as a dowry for a young woman or help to set up a
shop or enter into a small business for a young man.
While gender was not specifically mentioned in the legislation providing for edu-
cation, very different ideas were current in nineteenth-century Sao Paulo concerning
the education of a young girl as compared to that of a young boy. Using documentation
from the end of the eighteenth century on contemporary ideals of education in Brazil,
Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva concluded that the idea of education for a young girl was
that of forma~ao, or the education appropriate for feminine honor and domestic tasks,
which in theory included reading, writing, arithmetic, sewing, and embroidery. For
young boys, an education included Latin grammar and philosophy.35 The cases that
follow also suggest that learning a craft was only important to the education of boys
and that moral guidance and protection were most crucial in the case of girls. While
girls were also deliberately &dquo;contracted out&dquo; by their parents for educational purposes,
education in those cases took the form of manners and domestic education.

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
 233

An example of an 1850 case concerning a young boy named Paulino, who was
judged to be between twelve and fourteen years old, was a contest for the position of
tutor between Bento, a stonecutter, and Demetrio, a cattle drover.

Bento Lucar de Barros, of this city, declares that having a nephew called Paulo, son
of the deceased Rita, the aforementioned Paulino being presently in the power of
Demetrio do Couto de Nascimento, that nevertheless, since the supplicant is a
stonecutter who wishes to teach this craft to his nephew, that the latter would then have
an honest means of subsistence. In the power of the above-mentioned Demetrio the

nephew does nothing more than act as a cowhand to drive cattle in the country,
which cannot help to give him any kind of regular living in the future. Also the
nephew of the supplicant wishes to be employed as a stonecutter and to live in the
house of his kinfolk.36

The judge interviewed Paulino the orphan, who testified that he had received food
and clothes regularly from Demetrio but that he was frequently mistreated because De-
metrio had an irritable disposition (um genio arrebatado), and Paulino showed the
judge that he had scars that had been made with a whip. In his deposition, Demetrio
testified that

Paulino had been given to him by Paulino’s mother, as she had no means to support
him, and that both during her life and after her death he had taken care of Paulino as if
he were his own son, feeding him, clothing him, and teaching him his profession until
the orphan had finally reached an age where he could be of some real service, and then
appears Bento &dquo;somebody&dquo; (de tan and alleging to be kin to Paulino and that Paulino
had not been well taken care of, wishes that he (Bento) be named tutor and that
Paulino should receive salary and be taught to be a stone-cutter.

Since Demetrio had cared for Paulino for at least six years without compensation,
he was very upset. We might have expected that Demetrio would win his case, since
Paulino had been several years with him and since Paulino’s mother had entrusted him
to Demetrio. Perhaps if Paulino himself had asked to continue to live with Demetrio,
the court might have agreed since the principle of a long nurturing relationship was
given at least rhetorical importance in the court’s pronouncements. However, the judge
gave the position of tutor to the stonecutter Bento, probably because of the salary
(which Demetrio did not offer), the superior opportunity offered by apprenticeship as a
stonecutter, and the allegation of mistreatment corroborated by the boy. This case illus-
trates the conflict of the idea of tutor as that person who takes care of a child and has a
long association with him or her and the idea of the tutor as a teacher and employer.
The majority of the contracts for tutors found in the nineteenth-century records
were for young girls. For example, a contract in 1900 for Maria Monteiro, a nine-year-
old mulatto who had been abandoned by her parents, was executed for Benedicto de
Mores, a public functionary. He promised

that he would faithfully serve as tutor, without deceit or malice, attending to her neces-
sary education, scrupulously honoring her person, and paying her wages at the prom-
ised times. He obligated himself to be bound to the minor of 9 years through contract
and salary and to pay her 8 mil reis per month for the first year, 10 mil reis the second
year, 12 in the third, 15 in the fourth, until she reached 18 mil reis which would be her

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
234

adult salary. He was obligated to give her instruction, medical assistance, medicine,
clothes, shoes, all at his cost. The ward Maria was also not to go out into the street
except when accompanied by persons of trust. 37

It is notable (in comparison with the previous case) that there is no mention of
the kind of work Maria would do or whether instruction would include school.
This case illustrates the priority given by the courts for moral education and honor in
the education of young girls, as well as the recognition that work deserved monetary
compensation.
In addition to cases involving orphans and abandoned children, cases involving
ordinary children also appeared in the Juiz dos Orphaos. However, these were brought
to the court only in the case of an unusual problem. In 1830, Joaquina Maria de Espirito
Santo complained to the judge that she had placed her niece Maria Justina, age ten or
eleven, in the house of Dona Francisca Luzcia de Jesus so that the latter would teach
her housework, sewing, and everything necessary for her to marry and to take a posi-
tion as lady of the house. Instead, the niece ran away with a slave, and her aunt
wished the judge to find her. 38 This example illustrates the situation in which the
child’s residence in someone else’s house served a dual purpose: that of education
for the child and providing needed labor for the recipient household. It is not clear
from the documentation, but the agreement may have also provided income for the
child or for both the child and the aunt. It certainly provided room and board for the
child.
Most cases for young girls were consistent with these examples in that there is usu-
ally a salary, education in some form (including within the tutor’s house) was included,
embroidery or sewing was often mentioned, clothes and medicine were usually men-
tioned, and the provision that the young girl not go unaccompanied to the street was
always included.39 None of these contracts is very specific about either the work that
the young girl was to do or the form that her education should take. A criminal case
from Campinas in 1875 in which a woman was accused of having beaten her husband’s
ward Sabrina to death contains information about the work the eleven-year-old was
doing. She was described as daily fetching buckets of water from the well, washing
clothes, shopping for groceries, and cooking for the family.’ The testimony of neigh-
bors in this case demonstrated no surprise at the arduous work expected, of the child.
Correction in the form of whipping was also apparently expected, though the sugges-
tion was that it was excessive in this case. 41
In one case, a solicitous grandmother who suspected that the eleven-year-old Fortu-
nata was being exploited by her tutor Luiz Henrique was able to have Fortunata called
to the court for questioning.42 She was asked to describe the treatment she had men-
tioned to her grandmother. She said there was no bad treatment, but she had been sick
and could not do some of her work such as washing and starching clothes. She said she
was treated better than she had been by her previous tutor. She was also asked if she had

enough food and clothes and if she was sent to do errands in the street. She said she was
fine and that she only went outside with the family of her tutors. There was no mention
of school or education. The concern of the court is striking in this case, particularly as
Fortunata’s mother was a slave. However, not all orphans were so fortunate to have a
concerned adult of whatever status watching out for their interests.43
The question of a girl’s education and the priority given to morality and protecting
her honor comes up in another way with public education. Teachers’ reports for late-

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
 235

nineteenth-century Paraná report opposition to schools in which boys and girls were
taught together. Some parents educated their girls at home rather than send them to
mixed schools, especially as the girls began to reach puberty.&dquo; Also, parents often
wanted their daughters to be taught home economics rather than reading and writing,
which were not seen as useful for a young woman. From the parents’ perspective, pub-
lic education not only failed to provide moral and practical instruction that a young
woman needed, but it was also a dangerous environment for a pubescent daughter to

frequent. Both the daughter’s honor and the appearance of honor seemed better served
by educating her in a domestic situation. An imperial law of 1827 and a provincial law
of 1846 decreed that separate schools should be established for each gender. In prac-
tice, mixed schools were most common.
The rhetoric used by legislators and governors to discuss public education never
specifically cited issues of social control, such as crime prevention or idleness, as rea-
sons to promote school attendance. Instead, the focus was on the importance of educa-

tion, which was viewed as synonymous with morality, for prosperity in a free society.
For example, in 1834 Regent Diogo Antonio Feijo (speaking for the emperor) wrote to
the legislature that &dquo;Morals, the foundation of order, should be taught so as to support
the law, to maintain the public consciousness, and to act as the strongest guarantee of
public prosperity. Gentlemen: without education and without morals, it is not possible
to have a true civilization.&dquo;45 In 1843, the legislature noted that education has a &dquo;power-
ful influence on man, making him more sociable, more docile and less subject to
strange or fantastic ideas and prejudices. [Education is] absolutely indispensable to the
citizen of a free country, who must understand the progress of public business.&dquo;46 From
the perspective of Brazilian judges, the tutorship of poor children, including the incul-
cation of good work habits, was an important part of this education. It was certainly a
form of social control.

CONCLUSION
Enrollments in Brazilian public schools (as a proportion of the population ages
seven to fifteen) increased from 2.3 percent of school-age population in 1840, to 6
percent in 1870, 10 percent in 1900, and 18.5 percent in 1920.47 Notably, in the same
period, the population younger than fifteen years expanded to 42 percent. Both in
terms of the proportion of the labor force represented by children, and in terms of
resources needed for education, this is a stunning figure. In spite of an 1874 provincial
law making primary school compulsory, a school census conducted in Sao Paulo in
1920 revealed that less than a third of the school-age children in the state attended
classes.48 Secondary school education was even worse, and most secondary schools
were private. Clayton Cooper observed that public sentiment was not strong for the
enforcement of the laws for compulsory education in part because people (that is, gov-
ernment and the elite) saw education as unnecessary for the lower classes.
The &dquo;indifference&dquo; or resistance of the parents of nonelite children to education in
the early twentieth century was matched by a reported

national apathy regarding general education of the lower orders particularly. One offi-
cial in an inland city soberly excused the municipal authorities when accused of not
furnishing money for the much-needed high school ... by saying, &dquo;How could we
build a new school house, when we had only enough money to build the theatre?&dquo; On

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
236

the other hand, a Brazilian housewife more bluntly expressed her concern by saying,
&dquo;What would we do for servants if we educated all the common people?&dquo; The same
housewife further claimed that education gives &dquo;foolish ambitions&dquo; to working people
and asked why they should be educated?49

Such views on the part of elites do not strongly support an interest in universal com-
pulsory education for social control or any other reason. Instead, they support the con-
tinuation of a hierarchical elitist society. In recent years, it has been assumed that the
poverty of Brazilian education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a
problem of resources-that is, that the schools, teachers, and supplies were insuffi-
cient to provide the needed education for the school-age population. However, the an-
nual teachers’ reports of Sao Paulo for the 1840s through the 1860s demonstrate that
the problem of absence of demand for education by parents was at least as important a
part of the problem of poor education as was its supply. Parents in this period failed to
value public education (at least by comparison with child labor) or to see the courses
offered as useful to their children’s future lives. Furthermore, the considerable impor-
tance of child labor within the predominantly household-based economy in both rural
and urban sectors in this period meant that a child in school represented a loss of labor
for parents and kinfolk, as well as for prospective employers. The common identifica-
tion of children as workers in this period-which I argue was exacerbated by the de-
cline and disappearance of slave labor-presented a potent ideological and practical
challenge to the spread of popular education in Brazil.
No doubt Cunningham is correct as seeing social control as an important motivator
behind both the effort to employ children and the desire to educate them and keep them
in school in nineteenth-century Europe. However, for Sdo Paulo, Brazil, the social
control agenda must clearly be balanced by the very real and probably greater impor-
tance of child labor for household economies of the popular classes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my University of Kansas colleagues Shirley Harkess, Ray Hiner,
and Mehrangiz Najafizadeh for helpful comments and criticisms on the article. Sonja
Lipsett-Rivera also provided useful suggestions for which I am grateful.

NOTES
1. On Brazilian childhood, see Elizabeth Kuznesof, "Brazil," in Children in Historical and
Comparative Perspective, eds. Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1991); Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Bra-
zilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1946); and Mary del Priore (org.),
Historía da Criança no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Contexto, 1991). On the study of childhood
as Gilberto Freyre’s prime scholarly motivation, see Jeffrey Needell, "Identity, Race, Gender
and Modernity in the Origins of Gilberto Freyre’s Oeuvre," American Historical Review 100, no. 1
(1995): 51-77.
2. Hugh Cunningham, "The Employment and Unemployment of Children in England c.
Past and Present 126 (1990): 115-50.
1680-1851,"
3. On the relationship of child labor to the decline of slavery in the United States, see Robert
H. Bremner, John Barnard, Tamara K. Harevan, Robert M. Mennel, eds., Children and Youth in

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
 237

America: A Documentary History, vol. 2, 609-749 and especially 601-4. I want to thank Ray
Hiner for bringing this source to my attention.
4. Archivo do Estado de São Paulo (AESP), S.H., Macos de populâçao para o capital 1836,
caixa 37A. For a discussion of São Paulo censuses from 1765 to 1836, see Elizabeth Kuznesof,
Household Economy and Urban Development: São Paulo 1765-1836 (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1986).
5. For a study on a similar policy for apprenticeships of orphans and abandoned children in
nineteenth-century Ontario see Charlotte Neff, "Pauper Apprenticeship in Early Nineteenth-
Century Ontario," Journal of Family History 21, no. 2 (April 1996): 144-71. Also see the study
by Ann Blum on adoption and labor in Mexico in this issue.
6. Antonio Candido, Os Parceiros do Rio Bonito (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Jose Olympio,
1964), 23-9; Lia Freitas Garcia Fukui, "Parentesco e família entre sitiantes tradicionais" (Ph.D.
diss., University of São Paulo, 1972), 237; Kuznesof, "Brazil," 37; Maria Isaura Pereira de Quei-
roz, Bairros rurais paulistas (São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1973), 39-40; Jose Arouche de
Toledo Rendon, "Reflexões sobre o estado em que se acha a agricultura na capitania de São
Paulo," Documentos Interesantes 44 (1788): 196.
7. Kuznesof, Household Economy, 84.
8. AESP, Autos Crimes de Campinas, no. ordem 4050, caixa 22, processo 571, 18 julio
1859. For discussion of the common use of child labor in coffee, production, see also Thomas H.
Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo, 1886-1934 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 75, and Joseph L. Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian
Federation, 1889-1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), 76.
9. AESP, Fabrica de Ferro de Sorocaba, Ipanema, no. ordem 245, 1843, "Mapa dos servi-
cios da Fabrica de Ferro de S. Joao de Ipanema."
10. AESP, Fabrica de Ferro de Sorocaba, Ipanema, no. ordem 247, docs. 50, 51, and 54. The
records of the Ipanema Iron Foundry also relate how children were used to gather rocks to build
walls and to grind corn for flour for the factory community.
11. Eni de Mesquita, "O Papel do Agregado na Região de Itu 1773-1830," Colecão Museu
, Serie de Historia 6 (1977): 1-105; Alzira Lobo de Arruda Campos, "Os Agregados no
Paulista
Tempo dos Capitaes-Generais: O Exemplo de Cidade de São Paulo" (master’s thesis, University
, 156-7; Donald Ramos, "Vila Rica:
of São Paulo, 1978), 54-71; Kuznesof, Household Economy
Profile of a Colonial Brazilian Urban Center," Americas 35, no. 4 (1979): 514-16. The excellent
article by Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, "O Problema dos expostos na capitania de São Paulo,"
Anais do Museu Paulista 30 (1980/81): 147-58, focuses on abandoned children rather than agre-
gados, but the argument is similar.
12. Ruth C.L. Cardoso, "Creating Kinship: The Fostering of Children in Favela Families in
Brazil," in Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America, ed. Raymond T. Smith (Chapel Hill
and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 196-203.
13. Kuznesof, Household Economy, 169-70.
14. Campos, "Os Agregados," 54-78; Mesquita, "O Papel do Agregado," 43; Kuznesof,
Household Economy, 108, 156.
15. Kuznesof, Household Economy, 108.
16. Louise Tilly and Joan Scott, Women, Work and the Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1978), 13-14; Grant McCracken, "The Exchange of Children in Tudor England: An
Anthropological Phenomenon in Historical Context," Journal of Family History 8, no. 4 (1983):
303-13. Kristin Gager notes that Parisian charity hospices placed children as servants and
apprentices in households in the sixteenth century, as well as arranging adoptions. See
"Women, Adoption and Family Life in Early Modem Paris," Journal of Family History 22, no. 1
(1997): 16.
17. Kuznesof, Household Economy, 157, 180.

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
238

18. Lenira Menezes Martínho, "Organizacão do trabalho e relacões sociais nas firmas com-
erciais do Rio de Janeiro: Primeira metade do seculo XIX," Revista do Instituto de Estudos Bra-
sileiros 18 (1976): 41-62.
19. Stanley J. Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture: Textile Enterprise in an Underdevel-
oped Area 1850-1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 53-55; Love, São
Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 88; Eileen Keremitsis, "The Early Industrial Worker in Rio de
Janeiro, 1870-1930" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1982), 65.
20. The most comprehensive source of legislation on orphans is Jose Pereira de Carvalho,
Primeiras Linhas sobre o Processo Orphanologico, 9th ed. (legislation to 1865 added by Jose
Joaquim de Macedo Soares) (Rio de Janeiro: Eduardo and Henrique Laemmert, 1880). More
practical information on the lives of the orphans can be derived from Antonio de Paiva e Pona,
Orphanologia Practica, em que se descreve tudo o que respeita ãos inventarios, partilhas e mais
dependencias dos pupillos (Lisboa: Officina de Manoel Antonio Monteiro, 1959).
21. Repertório das ordenacões e leis do reino do Portugal (hereafter Ordenacões
), 4 vols.
(Coimbra, 1795), livro I, titulo 88, pars. 10-15. Also see the discussion in Joan Meznar,
"Orphans and the Transition from Slave to Free Labor in Northeast Brazil: The Case of Campina
Grande, 1850-1888,"
Journal of Social History 27, no. 3, (1994): 499-515. On abandoned chil-
dren see Renato Pinto Venancio, "Infáncia Sem Destino: O abandono de criancas no Rio de
Janeiro do Século XVIII" (master’s thesis, University of São Paulo, 1988).
22. Ordenacões
, livro 1, titulo 88 and livro 4, titulo 31.
23. AESP, Juíz dos Orphãos de São Paulo. Nineteenth-century cases include more than 3,000
documents. Research for this project focused on documents between 1830 and 1910, the period
of the richest documentation.
24. See Meznar, "Orphans," for a parallel argument on northeastern Brazil.
25. Elvira Mari Kubo, A Legislação e a Instrução Publica de Primeiras Letras na 5a
Comarca da Provincia de São Paulo (Curitiba: Secretário de Estado da Cultura e do Esporte,
1986), 41-50.
26. Primitivo Moacyr, A instrução e as províncias (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional,
1936/40).
27. AESP, Instrução Publica Capital, no. ordem 5035, 5036,1850-1870.
28. AESP, Instrução Publica Capital, no. ordem 5036, penha 12 October 1862.
29. AESP, Instrução Publica Capital, no. ordem 5035, 5036,13 October 1864.
30. The works of Mary Kay Vaughan focus on similar issues with respect to the history of
education in Mexico. See Vaughan, "Primary Education and Literacy in Nineteenth-Century
Mexico: Research Trends, 1968-88," Latin American Research Review 25, no. 1: 31-66.
31. Ordenações, livro 4, titulo 102.
32. This concern about children and crime is also manifest in the criminal code of 1830 and
its utilization for children from the age of seven. See Fernando Torres Londoño, "A Origen do
Conceito Menor," in Priore, 129-45.
, 31 janeiro 1775.
33. Alvara
34. Alvaras, 10 maio 1783, 6 diciembre 1802.
35. María Beatriz Nizza da Silva, "Educação Feminina e Educação Masculina no Brasil
Colonial," Revista de Historia 109(1977): 149-64.
36. AESP, Juíz dos Orphãos de São Paulo, 1850, no. ordem 5453, caixa 105, doc. 4.
37. AESP, Juíz dos Orphãos de São Paulo, caixa 161, doc. 16, 17 junio 1900.
38. AESP, Juíz dos Orphãos de São Paulo, 1830, no. ordem 5413, caixa 83, doc. 6.
39. For other cases of contracts of tutors for young girls, see AESP, Juíz dos Orphãos de São
Paulo, 1830, no. ordem 5413, caixa 83, doc. 6; 1852, no. ordem 5435, caixa 105, doc. 32; 1871,
caixa 118, doc. 42; 1890, no. ordem 5473, caixa 143, Cap. Antonio Joaquim Sousa Pinheiro.
40. AESP, Autos Crimes de Campinas, no. ordem 3989, processo 1642,1875.I want to thank
Alzira Lobo de Arruda Campos for bringing this document to my attention.
41. AESP, Autos Crimes de Campinas, no. ordem 3989, processo 1642, 1875.

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014
 239

42. AESP, Juíz dos Orphãos, 1852, no. ordem 5435, caixa 105, doc. 32.
43. AESP, Juíz dos Orphãos de São Paulo, 1850, no. ordem 5435, caixa 105, doc. 32-40.
44. Elvira Mari Kubo, Etelvima Maria de Castro Trindade, Maria Cecilia Marins de Oliveira,
Analise do Curriculo das Escolas do Ensino Primario e Secundario no Paraná (1853-1889)
(Curitiba, 1987), 7, 35-36.
45. Kubo, A Legislação
, 46.
46. Kubo, A Legislação
, 51.
47. Elizabeth Kuznesof, "The History of Education in Nineteenth-Century Brazil," unpub-
lished manuscript, 1968; Michael G. Mulhall, The Progress of the World (London: G. Routledge
and Sons, 1880).
48. Love, "São Paulo," 94.
49. Clayton Sedgwick Cooper, The Brazilians and Their Country (New York: Frederick A.
Stokes Company, 1917), 100-103.

Downloaded from jfh.sagepub.com at Scientific library of Moscow State University on January 15, 2014