Domestic child labor and teaching and learning to read in Brazil in late 19th and early 20th centuries

Abstract

This article analyzes newspaper ads collected in the digital magazine and newspaper archive of the Brazilian National Library in the period between the last decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century in which children are requested or offered to work, especially to domestic labor, and in which the possibility to learn how to read or to “finish learning how to read” is referred to. In a context of several changes in Brazil, the demands of reading, writing and counting grew expressively. The main argument developed is that work in the aforementioned period, notably domestic labor, was a space in which a portion of the Brazilian childhood learned how to read and write. The necessity for working and learning a craft, urban growth, lack of schools, the life conditions of children born after 1871 and the post-abolition period are among the reasons explaining this reality.