Abstract:
This article deals with the attempt of Fortaleza to apply a municipal regulation that aimed to regulate the hiring of house servants. We propose an understanding of this process from a broader movement, observed throughout the country, to control the labor of workers in cities, particularly those who provided domestic services. This article uses several research sources, mainly, the Posture of Allocation of Servants to Serve, the Book of Registration of Servants and the Enrollment of the Population of Fortaleza in 1887. All of them were produced by the Police Department in the same period and worked as complementary initiatives that sought to create a police for families, or a police to focus on a certain social segment. Such a project would become viable since domestic workers would be under the tutelage of employer household heads, and each would be registered in the police and obliged to carry an identification consisting of positive or negative assessments attributed to that individual by their employer. The general hypothesis is that such measures, coming from the government via the police, consisted of attempts to control the freedom of the poor in the city, including the former enslaved individuals, who, in Fortaleza, continued to serve in the homes of their former owners.
Keywords:
Fortaleza; domestic jobs; regulation