Power and everyday life : the lives of working women in nineteenth-century Brazil /

Written by a leading social historian, this monograph deals with the lives of ordinary women in 19th-century Brazil. Dias (Univ. of S~ao Paulo) concentrates on female social roles. Her subjects are black, white, Indian, and mixed-race women of the "oppressed classes." They lack protection or support from others, and include slaves, single women, single mothers, women unmarried or whose husbands had died or abandoned them--all providers for their children and, in many cases, the mainstay of emerging industrial growth. The book concludes with a chapter entitled "The Magic of Survival," describing the ways in which these women coped and struggled and, in the process, came to terms with the changing, urbanizing world. Dias's analysis draws on an array of statistics, travelers' accounts, and archival documentary sources. The tight writing style and level of specificity makes it mainly suitable for specialists in Latin American history. Contains 17 illustrations, tables, and nearly 40 pages of endnotes and citations. Upper-division undergraduates and above. R. M. Levine; University of Miami