Stretching the Boundaries of Legitimacy: The Changing Meaning of Family in Brazil

FAIN: FEL-273489-21

Sueann Caulfield
Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382)

Research and writing leading to a social history of Brazilian family law during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

My study is a social history of Brazilian family law over two centuries, largely from the perspective of non-marital children. It examines a range of lived experiences and social expectations regarding fathers’ relationships with their children of varied birth-status, as revealed through struggles of non-marital children and unmarried mothers to gain access to family rights by petitioning for “legitimation,” suing for paternal acknowledgment, requesting state pensions or other family benefits, or joining political movements. Analyzing these individual struggles within the context of public debates over women’s and children’s rights, my book reveals ground-level dynamics of major paradigm shifts in the legal conception of the family as it shifted from what legal scholars identify as “the patriarchal, patrimonial model,” shaped by nineteenth-century liberalism, to the “egalitarian and pluralistic model” that emerged from anti-authoritarian movements of the late twentieth century.

Associated Products

“Raising Brown Children in White Homes in Post-Abolition Brazil (Book Section)
Title: “Raising Brown Children in White Homes in Post-Abolition Brazil
Author: Sueann Caulfield
Editor: Keila Grinberg
Editor: Brodwyn Fischer
Abstract: This chapter explores the legacy of the patriarchal family structures that were central to Brazilian slavery by exploring the stories of two filhos de criação who brought paternity suits against their natal families in early twentieth-century Brazil. Each was born to an enslaved mother and raised in his alleged white father’s household at the end of the nineteenth century. Their experiences offer rare insight into the internal dynamics of a particular extended family structure that emerged from plantation slavery, in which lower-status filhos de criação were raised to occupy a variety of differentiated social positions within hierarchical extended families. These children seldom moved into the class status of their “legitimate” relatives but instead often maintained life-long, unequal relationships that combined different measures of love, affection, dependence, servitude, and resentment. Their stories reveal continuing uncertainty over how to define and enforce paternal responsibility and family membership in the aftermath of slavery.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/boundaries-of-freedom/65E8BBB039B9F5D27E1941F846EA872B.
Access Model: open access
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil
ISBN: 9781108917537

Os efeitos do silêncio: desigualdades e direitos das mulheres sob duas constituições oitocentistas (Book Section)
Title: Os efeitos do silêncio: desigualdades e direitos das mulheres sob duas constituições oitocentistas
Author: Sueann Caulfield
Author: Cristiana Schettini
Editor: Monica Duarte Dantas
Editor: Samuel Barbosa
Abstract: Revisita a produção recente no campo da história social brasileira a partir de uma indagação sobre os direitos das mulheres durante o longo período em que vigoraram as constituições liberais de 1824 e de 1891. Nenhuma das duas cartas magnas fez qualquer menção às mulheres; ambas garantiram os fundamentos de uma ordem familiar patriarcal. Sob a vigência das duas ordens cons-titucionais, o silêncio sobre as mulheres produziu distintas desigualdades jurídicas ao longo de dois séculos. Mas essa não foi uma história linear marcada exclusiva-mente por silêncios e exclusões. Os termos do direito constitucional incidiram em disputas por direitos e garantias que excederam amplamente as intenções dos legis-ladores e dos agentes judiciais. O conjunto da produção no campo da história social ao longo dos últimos 30 anos sobre esse extenso período, mesmo nos casos em que não assumiu uma perspectiva de gênero explícita, torna-se um excelente guia para acompanhar as demandas e negociações por direitos de diferentes grupos sociais atravessados pelo gênero.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.11606/9786599274411
Secondary URL: 10.11606/9786599274411
Access Model: Open access
Publisher: Portal de Livros Abertos da USP
Book Title: Constituição de poderes, constituição de sujeitos: Caminhos da história do Direito no Brasil (1750-1930)
ISBN: 2525-5959

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