Muriel Nazzari Book | Big and Tall Jeans sku-911040807

Muriel Nazzari's hardcover book, Disappearance of the Dowry: Women, Families, and Social Change in São Paulo, Brazil, 1600-1900, examines why dowries declined in practice without being legally abolished. Nazzari proposes that the spread of industrial capitalism was part of the explanation, while asking what led individual families to change their customs.

In seventeenth-century São Paulo, she found that practically all propertied families gave dowries to every daughter, often worth more than their brothers' later inheritances. By the early nineteenth century, fewer than a third did so. Those dowries were smaller and different in content, and some families endowed only one or two daughters.

The book relates this change to shifts in property, business, family roles and marriage as Brazil moved toward a society more organized around contracts and markets. It discusses the state's growing role, the separation of family and business, the decline of larger kin groups' power, and greater freedom for adult children to choose a spouse.

Old and new customs could coexist, even within one family. This item is listed under Big and Tall Jeans. SKU: sku-911040807.