Description: Teresa Benguela and Felipa Crioula Were Pregnant examines the experiences of motherhood for enslaved African women and their descendants who navigated the realities of reproduction in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on an extensive array of historical sources--including doctoral theses from the Faculty of Medicine of Rio de Janeiro, clinical case studies, manuals and treatises on popular medicine, commercial and runaway advertisements, baptismal records, and works by naturalists and ethnographers who traveled to Central and West Africa, as well as travel literature, fiction, memoirs, and a collection of watercolors and photographs--Telles illuminates the experiences of sexual autonomy, sexual violence, pregnancy, labor, breastfeeding, and the care of enslaved and freed babies in Rio de Janeiro between 1830 and 1888. Teresa Benguela and Felipa Crioula Were Pregnant also details the sorrows and hopes of these enslaved women and illuminates their escapes, strategies of resistance and survival, and the social networks they built to cope with the harsh realities and limitations that slavery imposed on motherhood in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.
Brief description: LORENA FÉRES DA SILVA TELLES is a historian and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) at the University of Pittsburgh and in the History Department at the State University of Campinas. Her research for this book won the Award for Best Dissertation in Social Sciences from the Latin American Studies Association.
Review Quotes: Lorena Féres da Silva Telles's study of pregnancy and infant care in the last years of slavery in Rio de Janeiro will be welcomed by everyone interested in the history of slavery across the Atlantic world. With sensitivity to the lives of individual enslaved women and careful attention to the thought and practice of medical professionals, Telles shows the importance of pregnancy and maternity to the crisis in slavery in Brazil.--Diana Paton "author of No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870"