Health & Environmental Research Online (HERO)


Print Feedback Export to File
7337188 
Journal Article 
“Madres esclavas”, partus sequitur ventrem, y naturalización de la reproducción esclava en el Brasil del siglo XIX 
Santos, MS 
2016 
Universidade Federal Fluminense 
22 
41 
467-487 
English 
Through an examination of slaveholders’ discourses on the need to find ways to replenish the slave labor force after the 1831 legal suppression of the African trade, this article demonstrates the centrality of female slave reproduction to the most significant debates on slavery and emancipation during the nineteenth century. Through tropes and metaphors that appealed to nature, this slaveholding discourse emphasized reproduction and mothering labor as the “natural” function of enslaved women-a function that would also serve to pacify rebellious male slaves. This work also demonstrates that, within a context of intensified symbolic value of enslaved women’s reproduction, slaveholders and jurists emphasized the validity of the legal device partus sequitur ventrem in order to communicate a notion of the legality of slavery, precisely at the time of increasing delegitimation of the institution, both within and outside Brazil. © 2016, Universidade Federal Fluminense. All rights reserved. 
Partus sequitur ventrem; Slave mothers; Slave reproduction