The Price of Virginity: Enslaved Women's Property Claims, Sexuality, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

This event is co-sponsored by The Cuba Observatory. 

This presentation analyzes a rare corpus of deflowering (estupro) lawsuits filed by enslaved women and compares them with similar suits filed by free women in nineteenth-century Cuba. Estupro accusations traditionally protected free women’s standing, or honor, in their communities. Free women’s honor depended on a contextually defined combination of lineage membership and sexual behavior. When deflowered, free unmarried women and their families lost their honor and could file sexual crime accusations against the men responsible for the act for compensation. Barred from criminal jurisdiction and denied honor (because they allegedly lacked lineage), enslaved women took their cases to civil courts as property disputes: they asked that defendants provide manumission monies in return for their virginity. 

The plaintiffs advanced a novel legal strategy: they reframed sexual intimacy as labor and asserted property rights in their reproductive selves. They also tried to upend the association of honor from lineage, linking it instead to property and contractual obligations. Rare (or even unique) within Latin America, these lawsuits likely arose as part of the unprecedented levels of monetization of slave labor in nineteenth-century Cuba. While the courts seldom granted relief, the litigation nonetheless generated enduring knowledge of the economic worth of feminized labor that persisted into Black women’s post-emancipation era calls for wages for housework.

Adriana Chira is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor of History and an Associate Professor of History at Emory University. She works on slavery, law, emancipation, and recently consent in Cuba and Latin America. She is the author of Patchwork Freedom: Slavery, Law, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations (2022), which won the James Rawley Prize for Atlantic World History from The American Historical Association, the Peter Gonville Stein Prize for best book in non-US legal history from the American Society for Legal History, the Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, and the Elsa Goveia Prize for excellence in Caribbean history from the Association of Caribbean Historians.