To Love, Honor, and Obey? Marriage Choice in Two Brazilian Slave Societies
dnorris10 April 13th, 2007
Katie Holt, assistant professor of history at The College of Wooster, will present “To Love, Honor, and Obey? Marriage Choice in Two Brazilian Slave Societies.” at the final Faculty at Large lecture of the spring semester on Tuesday, April 10. The presentation, which is free and open to the public, begins at 11 a.m. in Room 009 of Severance (Chemistry) Hall (943 College Mall).
The permeable borders of Brazilian enslavement - where slaves lived and worked alongside free people, and even themselves became free and purchased slaves of their own - fostered interaction and relationships between people who may differ by race but shared other formative experiences. Holt’s work contributes to the new scholarship from Brazil emphasizing the wide range of family types present in 19th century society, and the complex social relationships that linked people living in the same community across boundaries of race and gender.
“Such comparative studies have the potential to encourage new ways of thinking about the construction of race and gender throughout Atlantic slave societies,” says Holt. “Despite their shared legal and religious traditions, individuals in these two Brazilian communities developed very different notions of the significance of marriage and how to choose a spouse.
“My talk will also examine the wide range of household arrangements found in Bahia and Sabará,” adds Holt. “Throughout Brazil, sexual encounters, within and outside of marriage, consensual and forced, commonly transcended racial divisions. The greater racial fluidity in Sabará led to a higher incidence of formal marriages that crossed color lines. This flexibility in partner selection did not apply to slaves, however; the smaller holding sizes in Sabará dramatically reduced marriage candidates for slaves who were rarely permitted to enter into formal marriage with the slaves of a different master. Despite this obstacle, and an equally high sex imbalance in the early years of the century, slaves in Sabará were more than twice as likely to marry as those in Bahia, suggesting a greater access to the protections - albeit limited - afforded to slave families headed by legally married couples.”