A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil

By Cassia Roth

A Miscarriage of Justice examines women's reproductive health in relation to legal and medical policy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the onset of republicanism in 1889, women's reproductive capabilities—their ability to conceive and raise future citizens and laborers—became critical to the expansion of the new Brazilian state. Analyzing court cases, law, medical writings, and health data, Cassia Roth argues that the state's approach to women's health in the early twentieth century focused on criminalizing fertility control without improving services or outcomes for women. Ultimately, the increasingly interventionist state fostered a culture of condemnation around poor women's reproduction that extended beyond elite discourses into the popular imagination.

By tracing how legal thought and medical knowledge became cemented into law and clinical practice, how obstetricians, public health officials, and legal practitioners approached fertility control, and how women experienced and negotiated their reproductive lives, A Miscarriage of Justice provides a new way of interpreting the intertwined histories of gender, race, reproduction, and the state—and shows how these questions continue to reverberate in debates over reproductive rights and women's health in Brazil today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781503611337

Book preview

A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE

Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil

Cassia Roth

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Roth, Cassia, author.

Title: A miscarriage of justice : women’s reproductive lives and the law in early twentieth-century Brazil / Cassia Roth.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019019673 (print) | LCCN 2019021640 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503611337 (electronic) | ISBN 9781503610477 | ISBN 9781503610477 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503611320 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Maternal health services—Brazil—Rio de Janeiro—History—20th century. | Reproductive health—Brazil—Rio de Janeiro—History—20th century. | Women—Health and hygiene—Brazil—Rio de Janeiro—History—20th century. | Birth control—Brazil—Rio de Janeiro—History—20th century. | Birth control—Law and legislation—Brazil—Rio de Janeiro—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC RG963.B62 (ebook) | LCC RG963.B62 R68 2020 (print) | DDC 362.198200981/53—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019673

Cover design: Susan Zucker

Cover photo: From a photo of a ward in the Maternidade Laranjeiras, n.d., Wikimedia Commons

Typeset by Westchester Publishing Services in 10/14 Minion Pro

For Clayton (1984–2015)

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Currency, Spelling, and Translation

Introduction

1. The Law of Responsibility, the Medicine of Gender, the Science of Race

2. Constructing Motherhood: Obstetricians, Politicians, and the Creation of a Reproductive Healthcare System

3. Birthing Life and Death: Childbirth, Stillbirth, and Maternal Mortality

4. A Plague of Criminal Abortions: Fertility Control and the Consolidation of Medical Authority

5. Ouviu Dizer (Heard Said): Rumor, Sex, and Race in the Republican Capital

6. Policing Pregnancy: Statecraft, Poverty, and Reproductive Health

7. Prosecuting Honor, Defending Madness: Abortion and Infanticide in the Courts

Conclusion

Notes on Sources

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

Appendix F

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Map

Districts and neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, early twentieth century

Figures

1. Stillbirth rate per thousand total births, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1890–1956

2. Maternal mortality rate per ten thousand live births, Rio de Janeiro, 1903–1956

3. Maternal deaths per year according to cause, Rio de Janeiro, 1903–1938

Images

1. Façade of the Maternidade Laranjeiras, n.d.

2. Maps of the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Niterói, ca. 1930

3. Blueprint of the Maternidade Santa Isabel, 1899

4. Inside the Maternidade Laranjeiras, May 13, 1908

5. Foundational stone of the Maternidade do Méier, 1926

6. The waiting room at the Centro de Saúde de Inhaúma, 1927

7. Outside the Centro de Saúde de Inhaúma, 1927

8. Handwritten note from Isolina Castro to the midwife Elly Waeger, 1929

9. Maria da Gloria Amorim’s illegal midwifery clinic, 1928

10. La faiseuse d’anges [The Angel-Maker], Pedro Weingärtner, 1908

11. Margarida Rosa da Assumpção’s denunciation note, 1904

12. Eighteen-year-old Mercedes dos Santos, 1933

13. Location where Gloria Lourenço da Silva disposed of her newborn’s head

Tables

1. Location of registered births, Rio de Janeiro, 1894–1903

2. Color of obstetric patients, Maternidade Laranjeiras, 1922–1926

3. Nationality of white obstetric patients, Maternidade Laranjeiras, 1922–1926

4. Location of registered births, Rio de Janeiro, 1936–1938

5. Regulation and training of unlicensed midwives, Rio de Janeiro, 1935–1938

6. Maternal deaths according to cause, Rio de Janeiro, 1903–1938

7. Number of police investigations per decade, Rio de Janeiro

8. Color of women as percentage of investigations where color was recorded and of census population for Rio de Janeiro

9. Number of police investigations dealing with public disposals of newborns per decade, Rio de Janeiro

10. Abandoned cadavers found in public, Rio de Janeiro, 1891–1906

Acknowledgments

The research and writing for this book were generously supported by the American Historical Association, the Coordinating Council for Women in History, the Fulbright IIE, a European Union-funded Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (747374), the National Science Foundation (SES 1226599), UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, the UCLA Graduate Division, the UCLA History Department, the UCLA International Institute, the University of Georgia History Department, and the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation. Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia provided a generous subvention grant that supported the publication of this book.

My principal intellectual debt goes to Robin Derby and Bill Summerhill at UCLA. Their intellectual, academic, and personal guidance over the years has proven invaluable. I would also like to thank Ellen Dubois for her mentorship and guidance. In addition, I owe thanks to Aisha Finch, Bonnie Taub, and Kevin Terraciano. At the University of Edinburgh, I am particularly thankful for the advice and mentorship of Diana Paton.

In Rio de Janeiro, Luiz Antônio Teixeira at the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (COC-Fiocruz) has provided institutional support and intellectual guidance throughout my numerous stays in Brazil. Mariana Cavalcanti and Sérgio Monteiro gave crucial institutional backing during the early stages of research. I also owe thanks to Renilda Barreto, Ilana Löwy, Andreza Nakano, and Tânia Pimenta. Silvia Lara at Unicamp was crucial in helping me gain access to their archive in the late stages of the manuscript. Another thank you goes to Patricia Grijó at Fulbright in São Paulo.

I am indebted to the numerous archivists and librarians at all the institutions I visited. At the Arquivo Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, where I conducted the majority of my research, I am especially beholden to the many archivists who helped me over the years. In particular, I was lucky to have found several friends hidden in the sala de consultas, Suelem Demuner and Luis Fernando Santos Vieira. The tragic deaths of archivists Paulo Henrique Lima and Helen Mazur and their children, five-year-old daughter Gaya Mazur and three-month-old son Cícero Mazur Lima, occurred during my time in Rio de Janeiro. They are missed.

Throughout the years, innumerous scholars and colleagues have helped make this project a better one. I thank the three anonymous reviewers of the manuscript and my editor, Margo Irvin. Of course, all mistakes are my own. I have presented parts of this book at various conferences, seminars, and symposiums, and I am grateful for all the feedback I received. In particular, thank you to Marcos Alvarez, Molly Ball, Jake Blanc, Claudia Bonan, Sueann Caulfield, Amy Chazkel, Gayle Davis, Brodwyn Fischer, Daniel Franken, Keila Grinberg, Amanda Hartzmark, Louise Jackson, Martine Jean, Laura Kelly, Herbert Klein, Rebecca Lippman, Bonnie Lucero, Gabriela Marinho, Zubin Mistry, Mariana Muaze, Sara McDougall, Zubin Mistry, Jeffrey Needell, Okezi Otovo, Jane O’Neill, Julia Rodriguez, Susan Rosenfeld, Jennifer Scanlon, Sabrina Smith, Barbara Weinstein, Allen Wells, Schuyler Whelden, and Nilce Wicks. I thank Steve Ellsworth for letting me audit his course. A thanks to the members of GALACSI in the greater Atlanta area for reading parts of this manuscript during its final stages, including Lia Bascomb, Julia Gaffield, Jeffrey Lesser, Jennifer Palmer, Pablo Palomino, Tom Rogers, Alex Wisnoski, Yanna Yannakakis, and Corinna Zeltsman. And I’m grateful to my gender colloquium graduate students at UGA for carefully reading and commenting on the manuscript.

At Nursing Clio, I would like to thank my fellow editors and writers who have provided a feminist intellectual environment in which I have worked through various parts of this project. They have also shown me the importance of making history accessible to a wider audience. A special thanks to Laura Ansley for reading parts of the manuscript in its final stages.

At UCLA, in Rio de Janeiro, at the University of Edinburgh, and now at the University of Georgia, I have been supported by many friends and colleagues. I owe a special thanks to Daniel Franken, who has proven himself not only to be an excellent scholar of Brazil but also a supportive and caring friend, who read through the entire manuscript at various stages. I am also grateful to Dalal Alfares, Regiane Gouveia, Carla Lima, Rajashree Mazumder, Esha Momeni, Rielle Navitski, Dora Osborne, Tereza Valny, Devon Van Dyne, and Taylor Walle. Thank you to Hadley Porter, Muriel McClendon, David Myers, and Bill Summerhill for helping me during the last years of my time at UCLA. Maria Openshaw not only read various parts of this book and helped me understand women’s reproductive health in a clinical setting but also is a wonderful friend.

I owe a great deal of thanks to my family for their love and support over the years. My grandparents, Bev and Ken Paigen, have encouraged my educational endeavors financially, intellectually, and emotionally. My father, Gilbert Roth, who, although he died before this book even began, profoundly shaped my love for learning, my approach toward life, and my way of being in the world. My mother, Susan Paigen, has supported me in numerous ways. She also proofread a final version of this manuscript. I am lucky to have such wonderful sisters. Zoë has read various iterations of my work, and she has showed me how to be a model academic, one who is both serious and silly. Erica provided crucial crisis support over the last several years for which I am profoundly grateful. Thank you to Natalie and Nicole. And a hug for Fox.

Part of this project has been marked by loss and tragedy. I would like to thank all of my friends and family who have supported me throughout the last several years. On April 28, 2015, my partner Clayton was shot in the back twenty times while riding his motorcycle home from work in Rio de Janeiro. He survived in surgery for five hours before dying in the early morning of April 29. Clayton was a member of the military police, and he was targeted and executed for being an honest police officer who stood in the way of both drug trafficking and police corruption in the city. Clayton taught me so much about Brazil, and he opened my mind to perspectives I had never before considered. We Latin Americanists have a tendency to idealize poverty and violence in the region. Our one-sided diatribes against certain actors (in Rio de Janeiro it is often the military police) gloss over much deeper intellectual and empathetic understandings of social inequality, urban violence, and the state.

But more important than showing me his country, he showed me his heart. He taught me how to love, how to be loved, to laugh, to fight, to grow together, to take risks. His tragic and untimely death proves so painful and raw that I still cannot believe he is not here beside me, smiling and supportive, as I finish this project. To his wonderful being, his brief but beautiful time on earth, his smile, his heart, I dedicate this book.

Currency, Spelling, and Translation

The currency unit in Brazil throughout the period of this book was the milréis. One milréis was written as 1$000, and it was the equivalent of one thousand reis (plural of real). One thousand milréis was the equivalent of one conto de réis, or 1:000$000. Sources of historical exchange rate and cost-of-living data are cited in the endnotes. In addition, the Portuguese language had not yet been orthographically standardized in the early twentieth century. For proper names, I use the most common spelling that appeared in the documentation. I spell all proper names of places and other Portuguese words according to present-day conventions. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

Districts and neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, early twentieth century

Introduction

ON AN EARLY OCTOBER MORNING IN 1912, twenty-nine-year-old Isalina Vieira went into labor in Brazil’s capital city of Rio de Janeiro.¹ Accompanied by her female neighbor, Vieira went to the nearby public maternity hospital, Laranjeiras Maternity Hospital (Maternidade Laranjeiras), but upon their arrival, the night doorman notified the women that the doctor had refused Vieira’s entry—all the beds were occupied (Image 1).² Soon after, Vieira delivered her child on the hospital’s sidewalk, and it died minutes later. A municipal guard, who arrived after the birth, returned to the hospital for help, but the doctor again denied Vieira access. An ambulance later transported Vieira to another charity hospital for medical assistance. When a police officer (comissário) came to the scene, he spoke with Vieira’s friend and the guard who had assisted the women, sending the neighbor and the infant to the municipal morgue for a death certificate, as, in his words, no crime was suspected.³

The officer then notified his district police chief, who rejected his subordinate’s decision and opened an infanticide investigation. The chief questioned Vieira and her friend (both illiterate) as well as the doorman, several police officers, and the hospital’s physicians. Vieira testified that she was married but had been separated from her husband for twelve years, implying that the child was not his. Both women declared separately that while the child was born alive, it had fallen to the sidewalk during the birth after which the umbilical cord had ruptured. The medical student who had turned away the laboring Vieira told the police that he had been loath to break the hospital’s occupancy regulations. But the student’s rigid decision was not his alone to make. The supervising physician told the police that turning patients away could be reproduced, because the number of beds the Maternity Hospital has is very small in relation to the women [who seek out its services]. The physician also refuted the idea that makeshift arrangements were possible in a situation like Vieira’s, a thing that should absolutely not be utilized in his Hospital, whose cleanliness [is] indispensable for the wellbeing of the patients.⁴

IMAGE 1 ​Façade of the Maternidade Laranjeiras, n.d.

SOURCE: Museu da Imagem e do Som, Rio de Janeiro (MIS).

The police autopsy concluded that the cause of death was due to four factors: a premature delivery at eight months gestation, a ruptured umbilical cord, a small skull fracture, and the omission of the necessary care. The last clause, taken directly from criminal legislation, served as the motivation behind the investigation. But the police chief believed that the crucial factor required for a conviction was absent—the intent to kill. He argued that witness testimony had proven Vieira would not have gone to the hospital if she had planned to murder her child. While the district chief may have believed that Vieira’s sexual and reproductive life lay outside of the established norms of proper female sexual behavior—virginity or chastity outside of marriage and fidelity and motherhood within it—he believed she was innocent of infanticide.

Vieira’s tragic delivery, the ensuing police investigation, and her eventual exoneration exemplify the intersecting medical, legal, and social forces that shaped poor women’s reproduction in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro—Brazil’s capital city and the country’s center of legal and medical decision making. Vieira had gone to one of the few institutions that provided impoverished women free birthing facilities at the turn of the century. The hospital’s insufficiencies, however, demonstrate that obstetricians’ efforts to expand reproductive healthcare remained inadequate for the city’s poorest women, and the physicians’ callous behavior highlights the precarious and perhaps unethical state of clinical care.⁵

An uneven development of institutional medical care was not the only factor that shaped Vieira’s case. Lawmakers had recently rewritten criminal law with the Penal Code of 1890 (in effect until 1940), expanding criminal responsibility in relation to infanticide and clarifying its parameters. These laws allowed the police chief to investigate whether Vieira was criminally responsible for the death of her infant simply because she let it fall to the sidewalk. A professionalizing police force seized upon these new laws, and police-community interactions with residents like Vieira solidified the force’s presence in the everyday lives of Cariocas (residents of the city of Rio de Janeiro) in the early twentieth century. The police chief brought Vieira into contact with a judicial system ill-equipped to deal with the unfortunate but common event of neonatal death that marked many Brazilian women’s reproductive lives at the turn of the century. Yet the police’s actions proved contradictory in relation to Vieira’s case. The district police chief, initially suspecting infanticide, later took Vieira’s testimony into account to conclude that she had not committed a crime. While she faced no punitive legal response, the investigation questioned Vieira’s sexual life and subjected her to unnecessary police and community scrutiny.

Vieira’s pregnancy and delivery did not occur in a social vacuum, and witnesses’ involvement in the case further underscores the interpersonal and community relationships that shaped the way Vieira experienced the death of her child. On the most intimate level, Vieira was separated from her husband, and she never identified the child’s father. Yet female friendship proved crucial in the absence of a partner, demonstrating the importance of social support networks in women’s reproductive lives. Vieira’s female friend had escorted her to the hospital in the middle of the night. There, she begged the hospital’s on-duty personnel to admit Vieira because "she was very sick [passando mal]. Vieira’s friend thus served as a liaison to the medical community in a moment of crisis. Her friend also communicated with the on-duty municipal guard, who initially was suspicious" of the two women standing in front of the hospital. Once he realized the emergency, however, he called his colleague, who helped Vieira to the hospital and her friend to the morgue.⁶ In turn, the male guard’s favorable testimony dissipated any lingering doubts in the police chief’s mind, hinting at the gender norms surrounding the incident. Taken as a whole, Vieira’s case embodied the convergence of inadequate medical care with poor reproductive health outcomes, novel criminal legislation with overzealous policing, and community solidarity with longstanding gendered hierarchies.

A Miscarriage of Justice is a feminist history of reproduction that centers the lives and deaths of women like Isalina Vieira in its understanding of the past. It traces the multiple reasons behind women’s reproductive decisions over time, historicizing the legal, medical, and personal trajectory of reproduction in Brazil. Vieira was just one of the many women whom the Brazilian state investigated for allegations of fertility control after the end of slavery and the onset of republicanism in turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro. Her infanticide investigation thus highlights the centrality of women’s reproduction to Brazil’s expanding state apparatus and political agenda in the early twentieth century.

In 1888, the country became the last in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. Brazil’s gradual abolition process had been based on enslaved women’s reproductive capabilities—from the first attempts to end the slave trade in the 1820s to its final cessation in 1850; and from the 1871 Law of the Free Womb, which conditionally freed all children born to enslaved mothers, to final abolition in 1888.⁷ In 1889, a bloodless military coup overthrew the Brazilian monarchy (1822–89) and instituted a republican government, the First Republic (1889–1930), a decentralized federation in which states and their elite representatives held considerable political power.⁸ The expansion of republican forms of governance continued to dictate the parameters of women’s reproduction. In 1890, lawmakers passed their first piece of legislation, a penal code that increased women’s criminal responsibility for the crimes of abortion and infanticide and criminalized the illegal practice of medicine (both healing and religious practices and unlicensed practitioners including midwives) for the first time. A year later, the Constitution of 1891 shut women out of formal citizenship by implicitly restricting voting to literate males. In 1916, the country’s first civil code protected the property and inheritance rights of fetuses while curbing women’s own civil rights, subordinating their position in the family to their husbands or fathers. For their part, municipal and national public health programs expanded their efforts to improve maternal-infant health through well-baby clinics and the regulation of wet nursing, improving access, if unevenly, to these services at the same time that they naturalized maternal instincts and gendered divisions of labor. Politicians, jurists, and physicians (often one and the same) clearly understood the value of women’s reproduction as their country headed into a new century.

Medical and legal prescriptions on childbirth and fertility control, alongside women’s embodied experiences of gendered laws and inequalities, reveal an expanding, interventionist Brazilian state. The simplest explanation for the centrality of women’s reproduction to early twentieth-century politics is that women reproduced the country that elites were intent on shaping after the recent abolition of slavery and the end of monarchical rule. Women’s reproductive capabilities—their ability to conceive and raise future citizens and laborers—became critical to the growth and consolidation of the twentieth-century Brazilian state. But women’s reproductive capabilities also worked on an abstract level. Perceptions of women’s reproductive agency, whether real or imagined, influenced civil and criminal law and medical practice and policy. Most important, women’s reproductive experiences underpinned the way that Cariocas of all classes and colors reinforced or rejected shifting understandings of race, gender, and sexuality.

The end of slavery and the rise of republicanism forced all women’s reproductive lives—but particularly those of poor women—into regimes of institutional regulation, as various governmental and philanthropic entities intervened in women’s reproduction. On the one hand, obstetricians and public health reformers worked to medicalize pregnancy and childbirth. Municipal and national governments as well as philanthropic agencies showed a growing interest in creating a public health infrastructure geared toward maternal-infant health. In part because the science was rudimentary—the medical advancements that would drastically improve women’s reproductive health, including penicillin and blood transfusions, only occurred in the 1940s—and in part because the government did not adequately fund projects, health officials never effectively improved or expanded obstetric services, and high rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, and maternal mortality continued. Republican-era efforts, however, set the stage for later improvements in maternal-infant health that came about mid-century.

On the other hand, the police and the criminal justice system increased their surveillance and prosecution of abortion and infanticide. The Rio de Janeiro police force consolidated and expanded in the first several decades of the republican period, and its administrative structure, which entailed providing both social services such as admittance letters to public hospitals and criminal enforcement duties such as investigating abortion, meant that the force simultaneously played the role of medical first responder and jailer. Moreover, criminal courts began prosecuting abortion and infanticide with more frequency, although systemic inefficiencies hampered effective judicial practice across the city. Ultimately, this punitive focus created a culture of condemnation surrounding poor women’s pregnancy and childbirth that extended beyond elite discourses into the popular imagination. The republican political order intensified its surveillance of women’s reproductive bodies in both concerted and unconscious efforts to establish political hegemony, endeavors that channeled the institutionalization of longstanding gender and racial hierarchies into new forms.

The expanded state surveillance of women’s reproduction during the First Republic set the stage for later government action. The republican political status quo, in which regional elites negotiated power-sharing arrangements that excluded most Brazilians from participatory democracy, ended in 1930. By then, the Rio de Janeiro police force had institutionalized, the judicial system had expanded, and physicians had professionalized and become a powerful lobby in the public sphere. The so-called Revolution of 1930 was a bloodless coup that brought to power as provisional president Getúlio Vargas, a politician from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. In the decade that followed, Vargas became increasingly authoritarian, a tendency that culminated in his dictatorial Estado Novo (1937–45). Vargas’s nationalist rhetoric and policies emphasized the importance of women’s reproductive capabilities to the nation, and maternal-infant health became a principal concern of the centralizing federal government.⁹

The criminalization of fertility control, although never an explicit part of the Vargas agenda, underlay these public policies toward women’s health. State attention toward fertility control during the Vargas era was a more diffuse form of state power that cannot be traced to a particular government program. In other words, while the Vargas-era state may not have prioritized cracking down on the practices of abortion and infanticide, the threat of these practices underpinned all maternal-infant healthcare initiatives. In fact, by the onset of the Estado Novo, the policing of women’s reproduction had shifted from the judicial to the public health realm. State bureaucracy had expanded; as a result, official efforts at monitoring women’s reproductive decisions were made in the medical and not the legal sphere. The law continued to criminalize fertility control, but physicians, and not the police, were now on the front lines. The writings and actions of physicians and legal practitioners demonstrate that combating abortion was built into the very public health and state apparatuses created to improve women’s reproductive health.

Brazilian women’s early twentieth-century reproductive negotiations are part and parcel of a larger global history of modern state formation. We cannot separate women’s reproductive practices—from planning for a wanted pregnancy to undergoing an abortion—from larger political processes and gendered power dynamics.¹⁰ In Brazil, and across the western world, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a period of increased public scrutiny of women’s reproductive lives. Expanding states began criminalizing abortion, and urbanization, immigration, and industrialization pushed women’s fertility into the public consciousness. The centrality of women’s reproduction in transitional political regimes, whether post-abolition, post-colonial, or post-democratic, resonates outside of Brazil.¹¹

In turn-of-the-century France and the United States, for example, debates over the future of the national race reflected larger political concerns over women’s bodies and the reproduction of the citizenry in the private sphere.¹² For their part, twentieth-century states from Chile to Iran allowed women symbolic access to citizenship by recasting women’s maternal identities as crucial to national development.¹³ Nation-states extolled the private virtues of domesticity and through this discourse allowed women to enter the public sphere.¹⁴ As the century progressed, Cold War debates over the spread of communism centralized family planning discourses and policies within international politics.¹⁵ Women from Peru to Japan gained access to contraceptives, but new medical technologies did not necessarily (or ever) result in women’s expanded rights.¹⁶ Of course, women’s fertility was not the only factor at stake. Over the first half of the twentieth century, debates surrounding the quantity, quality, and distribution of the world’s population fueled global strife over imperial projects of territorial expansion—not to mention two world wars.¹⁷ Yet it is telling that current debates over nationhood, globalization, and development continue to center on women’s reproduction.¹⁸

Despite the centrality of women’s reproductive practices to the trajectory of state expansion across the globe, historians often separate their analysis of fertility control from discussions of both pregnancy and childbirth and reproductive health trends like maternal mortality and stillbirth rates. In Brazil, for example, a rich historiography explores maternal-infant health policies and elite conceptions of motherhood during the early twentieth century.¹⁹ Scholars have also begun exploring women’s practices of and state policies toward abortion, infanticide, and contraception.²⁰ Yet the interconnected, and perhaps inseparable, nature of women’s reproductive health with fertility control remains underexplored.²¹ This division has resulted in methods that understand the process from isolated points of view—legal, medical, cultural—rather than in an integrated methodology that underscores how various spheres intersected to shape reproductive politics. A Miscarriage of Justice departs from these approaches by analyzing medical, legal, social, and political trends in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro in relation to women’s reproductive experiences—miscarriage and abortion, stillbirth and infanticide, pregnancy and the birth of a healthy infant. When Isalina Vieira went to the hospital to give birth, for example, all accounts demonstrate that she wanted her child. However, the infant’s neonatal death evidences how a negative outcome easily accompanied if not a wanted at least an accepted pregnancy.

In the end, a detailed exploration of legal and medical policy toward women’s reproductive health must still privilege women’s own experiences. In this book, I demonstrate the specific legal and medical mechanisms and individual negotiations that influenced the everyday forms of state formation in Rio de Janeiro and ultimately the political trajectory of early twentieth-century Brazil.²² This book intervenes at the intersection of social and political history from the perspective of women’s reproduction, opening up new ways for thinking about the gendered intersection of state structure and individual experience across the globe.

Gender, Race, and Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil

Brazil holds the singular status as the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, a development that coincided with the end of monarchical rule and the implementation of (restricted) democratic politics. This set of events presents a specific way to look at race, gender, reproduction, and the state. Scholars of the Atlantic world have examined the centrality of women’s reproduction and sexuality to the institution of slavery, its abolition, and the forms of post-emancipation societies.²³ Unlike many post-abolition societies, Brazil was not under the yoke of colonial rule. Democratic ideals and full emancipation went hand in hand. So too did new forms of social control. Post-abolition governmental approaches toward reproduction in Brazil were part and parcel of the Republic’s cementing of new forms of power. Rather than unveiling the intimacies of empire, however, the Brazilian case uncovers the intimacies of the state.²⁴ Moreover, in contrast to the United States, Brazil’s rival slave-owning power, post-emancipation governance did not explicitly exclude or restrict black lives through Jim Crow laws or sterilization practices.²⁵ But the on-the-ground interactions between the criminal justice system, the medical profession, and poor women of all colors in the realm of reproduction demonstrate how racial and gender biases—for example Afro-Brazilian women’s supposed hypersexuality—became cemented into democratic governance after abolition. The republican Brazilian state curbed full citizenship through its regulation of reproduction, and I contend that reproductive policies and politics continued to dictate the legacy of slavery in all women’s lives.

The capital of Rio de Janeiro was the center of political decision making, and women’s reproductive negotiations with an expanding state within its borders served as a model for gendered and racialized interactions across the country. At the turn of the twentieth century, three key processes transformed Rio de Janeiro for women (and men) of all classes and colors: exclusionary democratic principles, demographic and urban changes, and the reformulation of racial, class, and gender ideologies. In the political realm, the republican implementation of liberal politics did not increase mass political participation, and it resulted in the maintenance of formal citizenship as a white and masculine realm.²⁶ The Constitution of 1891 enshrined equality regardless of color or race and removed property requirements for male voters. Yet it still excluded the majority of the population from political participation through literacy requirements for suffrage, which, coupled with the near absence of a public education system, effectively shut the door of political citizenship for poor and working-class men of all colors.²⁷ The Republic supported democracy and racial inclusion on paper but denied them in practice.²⁸ The continuation of masculine patronage networks that had long dominated nineteenth-century politics further marked the political sphere, with male elites in the southeast of the country creating a one-party system to share power among its members.²⁹ Moreover, political violence and corruption marked the republican era, with increased occurrences of both informal and formal labor unrest in the 1910s and 1920s and subsequent government repression.³⁰

While the republican regime masked its racial exclusions in the language of equality, it explicitly restricted women’s formal citizenship. In the debate surrounding the passage of the constitution, some legislators initially considered extending suffrage to wealthy, educated, and unmarried women—elite white women who were not legally under the control of their husbands. Nevertheless, the document’s exclusion of any specific reference to women meant that after its passage, male politicians barred women from the rights of suffrage and holding political office.³¹ The Civil Code of 1916 further codified women’s inequality, subordinating their decisions to the male head-of-household.³² Either the father or the husband was in control of a woman’s reproductive capacity. The code also theoretically elevated fetal rights above the mother’s, making the state, for the first time, a patriarchal enforcer of fetal life. Within this conservative and masculine milieu, early twentieth-century feminist movements for gender equality embraced maternalist claims to gain access to legal and political rights in Brazil—and across Latin America.³³ Support of the nuclear family, and thus motherhood, was the manner through which elite white women entered the public sphere.

Political shifts in the 1930s changed the specific ways citizenship was gendered and racialized, but its underlying biases remained the same. After coming to power in 1930, Vargas worked to centralize a deeply federalized nation with the city of Rio de Janeiro at its center. He suppressed major regional uprisings and expanded patronage networks by putting loyal allies in charge.³⁴ As the years progressed, Vargas took on a populist mantle to expand his base, providing social and economic rights in exchange for popular support. His corporatist model granted specific social groups—industrial workers, mothers—political influence through personal ties based on group identity. Thus, protective labor legislation and political reforms such as women’s suffrage for literate women over the age of twenty-one (1932) were coupled with expanded state control, and in the realm of gender these policies reinforced the maternal nature of women’s citizenship. Vargas included white women and working-class men of all colors in new understandings of national citizenship to maintain political control and create a new Brazilian identity. The truly impoverished, however, continued to exist outside the structures of state patronage. When he dissolved parliament and instated his corporatist dictatorship in 1937, Vargas co-opted labor unions and eliminated the right to vote for all Brazilians, effectively demobilizing any radical action. Vargas eliminated any rights women or the working class had won with the end of democratic governance.³⁵

As educated, white women struggled for full citizenship within the comforts of their class, poor women, especially immigrants and women of color, saw physical and demographic transformations in Rio de Janeiro further circumscribe their tenuous hold on citizenship. In particular, immigration, urbanization, and the rise of a wage labor force altered the city’s makeup—and women’s roles within it. After abolition, large numbers of formerly enslaved people left coffee plantations in the interior of the state and migrated to the city as immigrants arrived from Europe.³⁶ For instance, in 1890, 30 percent of the city was foreign born and 26 percent were migrants from other states.³⁷ Of the city’s entire population in that year, over 37 percent were of African descent. Migration and immigration caused the city’s population to almost double between 1872 (274,972) and 1890 (522,651) and triple between 1890 and 1920 (1,157,873). By 1940, the population had reached nearly 1.8 million inhabitants.³⁸ Before abolition, both enslaved and free women labored mainly as domestic servants within the city’s limits. Emancipation freed all enslaved people (nearly 18 percent of the city’s population in 1872), but most poor women of color—who had composed half of the city’s enslaved population on the eve of abolition—continued to labor informally as domestics into the twentieth century.³⁹

Rapid growth resulted in the rise of cramped and unsanitary housing conditions and the continuation of epidemic diseases such as yellow fever that had long ravaged the capital. In response, urban reformers transformed the city, knocking down tenement housing and pushing poor residents to hillside favelas or to distant suburban communities.⁴⁰ Although officials never explicitly stated their racial politics, governmental attempts to urbanize and sanitize Rio de Janeiro had racial subtexts, for white elites hoped to first contain and then eliminate the black and brown presence in the city’s center.⁴¹ Public health officials, for their part, redoubled their efforts to combat infectious disease through programs such as mosquito control and mandatory vaccinations.⁴² And whereas various philanthropic and public health agencies developed the city’s reproductive health infrastructure, it never met the needs of a growing population. Urban planning and public health policies were a key aspect of state expansion; while improving countless lives, these policies also reinscribed inequality and hierarchy into the built landscape of the city (Image 2).

During this period of political and structural change, more insidious sexist and racist ideologies continued to restrict women’s access to full citizenship. In Brazil, reconfigurations of patriarchal power based on maternalist views of women’s sexual honor—that women’s sexuality was strictly tied to their identities as mothers—intimately shaped early twentieth-century understandings of citizenship.⁴³ Feminist scholars define patriarchy as a man’s governance of his family through economic and emotional power.⁴⁴ In western liberal democracies, the hierarchical organization of familial relations and private property extends from the home into the public realm, structuring all aspects of social, political, and economic life.⁴⁵ According to Wendy Brown, a patriarchal state is one whose institutions, practices, and discourses become bound up with the prerogatives of manhood in a male-dominant society.⁴⁶ Of course, modern states are not monolithic institutions, but rather, unbounded terrain of powers and techniques, an ensemble of discourses, rules, and practices, cohabiting in limited, tension-ridden, often contradictory relation with one another.⁴⁷ In Rio de Janeiro, public health agencies, criminal courts, and legislatures; lawmakers, physicians, and mid-level bureaucrats; and their respective policies, practices, and ideologies all formed the complex matrix within which women negotiated their reproductive lives.

Brazilian state policies toward women’s reproductive bodies also served and bolstered patriarchy in racialized ways. They ensured property rights, increased the workforce, reinforced gendered divisions of labor, and criminalized the reproduction of certain individuals or groups. In some ways, republican policies regarding gender and sexuality were nothing new. Elites had long focused on Brazilian women’s reproductive capabilities. Slave owners and legislators, for example, debated enslaved women’s (in)ability to reproduce the slave labor force throughout the nineteenth century, which resulted in a gradual abolition process based on their wombs. Of course, Brazilian slave owners and political elites also believed in the supposed hypersexuality of black women’s bodies. While legislators gave enslaved women the right to both sexual honor, for instance prosecuting rape, and maternal honor, by hearing their claims for their children’s freedom, they also viewed women of color as more inclined to lose that honor through unbridled sexuality or through bad mothering practices.⁴⁸ Black female sexuality was juxtaposed with the sexual honor of white women, whose chastity was the foundation of the Brazilian family throughout the colonial and imperial periods—as a cultural ideal through which men’s honor was sustained, as the physical manner by which men defined and controlled familial inheritance and consolidated and perpetuated political control, and as a social method of reinforcing stratification as elite families had more resources at