Misbehaved women: crime, gender and race in São Paulo (1850-1900)

This dissertation is concerned with reconstructing the process of state intervention which manifested itself in the figure of the legal and police apparatus, in the everyday lives of impoverished women, regardless of whether they were black or white, native or foreign, free, freed or enslaved, and the types of relation between them, whether it be that of solidarity, kinship, or conflict, during the second half of the 19th century in the city of São Paulo. State interference was enmeshed, on one hand, with the effort to discipline workers during the decline of slavery, and on the other, with the emergence of scientific moral prescriptions regarding white and black women starting in the middle of the 19th century. For this purpose, charges involving women in cases of theft, homicide, vagrancy, physical and verbal offenses, as well as upright living terms, which were judicial devices that standardized offenses against morality, good manners, public tranquility, and the well-being of families, were utilized. The agency of drunkards turbulent women and vagabonds and other type of criminals, establishes that the police stations of the capital became negotiating spaces for concepts such as work, honor, morality, and vagrancy, both by offenders as well as witnesses and police officials (AU)