Teresa Benguela and Felipa Crioula Were Pregnant

A look over the shoulders of enslaved women who navigated reproduction and motherhood in Rio de Janeiro during the nineteenth century

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.