Protecao e Obediencia – Criadas e seus patroes no rio de janeiro 1860-1910

This book is not only about the slave and free women who labored as domestic servants in Rio de Janeiro in the years between 1860 and 1910. The concern is to recover the experiences of servant women as they conducted working and private lives, and to see them as they were seen and reacted to by those who owned or hired them, the actions expressed in their lives and the meanings those actions can be made to disclose–the ‘webs of significance’ in Clifford Geertz’s phrase–led quickly to the multiple contexts in which servants located their lives.