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Hugh Cunningham recently argued that in nineteenth-century Europe, social con trol was the major concern of authorities promoting both child labor and public education. This article examines this thesis for nineteenth-century São Paulo, Bra zil, using Portuguese legislation concerning orphans, cases of tutorship, criminal records, records of child labor from industries, and annual reports of São Paulo primary teachers. The evidence shows that child labor was regarded as educa tional both in the moral sense and to acquire skills for children age seven and older and that employers also valued child labor. The efforts to develop public educa tion, on the other hand, were hampered by the resistance of parents to sending their children to school rather than sending them to work or using them for chores at home. While social control was definitely an underlying agenda of elites in their ideas for popular education (since it was seen to prevent crime), the contribution of child labor to household economy was much more important from the perspec tive of average Brazilian families.

In the nineteenth century some 20–60% of the Brazilian population was born outside of wedlock and for the white population the proportion was about 30%. Higher proportions of both colored and white single mothers were found in urban than in rural or suburban areas of São Paulo in 1836. However, illegitimacy was invariably higher for the colored population in whatever location. Nevertheless, unmarried white mothers had significantly more illegitimate births per single mother than did the unmarried colored mothers and demonstrated persistance over time in this behavior. This non-marrying behavior and single motherhood was nevertheless joined to a cultural ideology and legal system in which marriage and legitimacy were strong positive values. Nineteenth-century baptism records of illegitimate and "natural" free children in São Cristovão, Rio de Janeiro demonstrate the presence of fathers at 27% of baptisms and of grandparents at near 40% of baptisms. Maternal grandmothers were especially important. Neither fathers nor grandparents appeared at slave baptisms–which in São Cristovão were 100% illegitimate–though godparents were almost always present.

The relationship of household and family organization to changes in the larger economy (e.g., commercialization, industrialization) has long fascinated and baffled scholars. Data that specifically link the household and/or family unit to economic change have proved elusive, and most studies do little more than note temporal crosscultural coincidences of demographic and residential characteristics with those of economic development. The means by which the household interacted with the economy, what the patterns of interaction were and how they were determined in a given time and place are significant questions which are seldom addressed. Even less accessible are the changes in the dynamics of household organization in conjunction with economic development in terms of informal economic and social exchanges and household and family formation.