They Did All Kinds of Work: Enslaved Women’s Labor in Nineteenth-Century Luanda

Enslaved women did all kinds of work within the household and outside of it in nineteenth-century Luanda. By 1850, women represented 63.5 percent of the slave population. Based on slave registers, reports from Luanda’s police and announcements published in the Boletim Oficial do Governo da Provincia de Angola (BOA), this paper analyzes the occupations of enslaved women in mid-nineteenth-century Luanda, a period of economic transition and urban development. By cross-referencing the data found in these documents, this paper seeks to investigate: a) who were their masters; b) what kind of work did these enslaved women perform; and c) what dangers did they face in their everyday lives. As the data presented in this paper reveals, Luanda did not follow the traditional sexual division in which enslaved women did most of the housework and enslaved men participated in specialized activities. Enslaved women performed specialized activities traditionally dominated by men. Meanwhile, slave men did tasks considered to be a female lot, such as the preparation of food and manufacture and care of clothes. Therefore, this paper argues that within the slave population men and women competed for the same type of occupations in mid-nineteenth-century Luanda. However, as police reports illustrate, women were more vulnerable to violence in the workplace.