Abstract
In this article, I will try to show the active participation and importance of women in the lower sectors of retail, in domestic work, and in the food selling and entertainment establishments and how plantation history has traditionally disregarded economic participation by women in the nineteenth century. In an urban context, the services provided by these women, the majority of them poor and coloured, played a crucial role in the city’s economic life. Domestic work, food preparation and small retailing were important components of San Juan’s ‘service’ economy. I also want to explore the repeated attempts by the state to regulate the economic activities of women, particularly those connected with what we would call today the informal sector. Women had to fight the efforts by local authorities to control various aspects related to their work and lives: prices, mobility, gatherings, housing, sexuality and family. Another topic I want to discuss is the heterogeneity found among economic sectors — like domestic work — traditionally associated with women. Not all domestic work was the same, and there were some important differences in the status, remuneration and quality of life associated with some domestic employment. Both the solidarities and the differences among working women need to be studied if their lives are to be truly understood from a historical perspective.
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Endnotes
Fernando Picó, ‘Nociones de Ordén y Desordén en la Perifería de San Juan, 1765–1830’, Revista de Historia, 1, #2 (1985), p. 50, and Adam Szaszdi, ‘Credit Without Banking in Early Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico’, The Americas, 19, #2 (1962), pp. 160–61.
See Birgit Sonesson, ‘Puerto Rico’s Commerce, 1835–1865: From Regional to Worldwide Market Relations’, PhD. Dissertation (New York University, 1985), pp. 47–48, and Arturo Morales-Carrión, Auge y Decadencia de la Trata Negrera en Puerto Rico (1820–1860) (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1978), pp. 33–45.
Ruth Picke, ‘Penal Servitude in the Spanish Empire: Presidio Labor in the 18th Century’, Hispanic American Historical Review (hereafter, HAHR), 58, #1 (1978), pp. 21–40.
Silvia M. Arrom, Las Mujeres de la Ciudad de Mexico, 1790–1857, (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1988), pp. 196–200. Also, Elizabeth Kuznesof, ‘A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America, 1492–1980’, in Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro (eds), Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), pp. 24–26.
Fernando Picó, Historia General de Puerto Rico (Río Piedras: Ediciones Huracán, 2nd edn, 1986), p. 52.
Iñigo Abbad y Lassiera, Historia Geográfica, Civil y Natural de la Isla de San Juán (Río Piedras: Editorial Universitaria, 3rd edn, 1979), p. 107.
See Gilberto Aponte, San Mateo de Cangrejos: Comunidad Cimarrona en Puerto Rico (San Juan: Comité Historias de los Pueblos, 1958), pp. 17–18.
Francisco Scarano, Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 14, and Laird Bergad, Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism in 19th-century Puerto Rico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 68–73.
Anibal Sepúlveda, San Juan: Historia Ilustrada de su Desarollo Urbano, 1508–1989, (San Juan: Carimar, 1989), pp. 171–81.
See Jay Kinsbruner, ‘Caste and Capitalism in the Caribbean: Residential Patterns and House Ownership among Free People of Colour in San Juan, PR 1823–1846’, HAHR, 70, #3 (1990), pp. 434–35.
An excellent synthesis of the literature on class and social structure in urban colonial Latin America can be found in Susan Socolow’s, Introduction in Louisa S. Hoberman and Susan Socolow (eds), Cities and Society in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), pp. 3–18. On Puerto Rico’s case, see Angel Quintero Rivera, Conflictos de Clase y Política en Puerto Rico (Río Piedras: Ediciones Huracán, 3rd edn, 1981), pp. 117–26 and James Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 57–61. On Ponce’s merchants, see Scarano, Sugar and Slavery, pp. 79–99 and pp. 144–60, and Ivette Pérez Vega, ‘Las Sociedades Mercantiles en Ponce, 1817–1825’, Anales de Investigación Histórica, VI, No. 2 (July–December 1979), pp. 52–112. On San Juan’s merchants, see Sonesson, ‘Puerto Rico’s Commerce’, pp. 48–66 and 292–433; Carmen Campos Esteve, ‘La Política del Comercio: Los Comericantes de San Juan, 1837–1844’ (masters thesis, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, Department of History, 1987), and Nilsa M. Ortíz, ‘Las Sociedades Mercantiles en San Juan, 1870–1880’, Anales de Investigación Histórica, I, #3 (October–December 1974), pp. 74–104.
Many of the women were women of colour. See Paulette Kerr, ‘Jamaican Female Lodging House Keepers in the Nineteenth Century’, The Jamaican Historical Review, XVII (1993), pp. 7–17.
Edward B. Emerson travelled to San Juan in 1831. He initially stayed in a posada (guest house or inn) where the sleeping accommodations were, in his opinion, very poor. Emerson landed a job with the US consul Sidney Mason and moved to his boss’s house. See ‘Diario de Edward Bliss Emerson, (San Juan, 1831–32’, Historia y Sociedad, 4 (1991), pp. 168–69 and pp. 174–81.
‘La Calle del Mondongo’, Alejandro Tapia y Rivera recalled. See his Mis Memorias o Puerto Rico Como lo Encontre y Como lo Dejo (Río Piedras, Edil., 3rd Edn, 1979), p. 51.
See Frank Otto Gatell, ‘Puerto Rico in the 1830s: The Journal of Edward Bliss Emerson’, The Americas, 16, No. 1 (July 1959), p. 69.
Jay Kinsbruner, ‘The Pulperos of Caracas and San Juan during the First Half of the 19th Century’, LARR, 13, #1 (1978), p. 72.
Levi Marrero, Cuba: Economía y Sociedad (Madrid: Playor, 1988), 14, pp. 151–56.
See Adolfo de Hostos, Historia de San Juan: Ciudad Murada (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1965), pp. 477–79.
For an interesting account of the social conditions experienced by later nineteenth-century laundresses in Río de Janeiro, see Sandra Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in 19th-century Río de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 40–45, and 52–53.
On women and the nineteenth-century Cuban cigar industry, see Olga Cabrera, ‘Cuba y la Primera Experiencia de Incorporación Fabril de la Mujer: La Obrera Tabaquera’, Revista de Indias, XLIX, No. 185 (1989), pp. 227–33.
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© 1995 Department of History, U.W.I., Mona, Jamaica
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Matos-Rodríguez, F.V. (1995). Street Vendors, Pedlars, Shop-Owners and Domestics. In: Shepherd, V., Brereton, B., Bailey, B. (eds) Engendering History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07302-0_10
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