The History of Women is almost absent from Portuguese historiography, especially on what concerns the study of female social marginalization, a phenomenon that covered the vast Portuguese colonial space, from Brazil to the Far East, and affected slaves, orphans and many other cases of social inferiority. A brief overview of the historiographical space usually called “History of Portuguese discoveries and expansion” sheds light on new fields – gradually distant from the traditional perspective that celebrates the great male heroes of colonial expansion – in search for a cross-disciplinary line of investigation of the so-called “other”, that would bring together different social, cultural and symbolic spaces, within the research strategy itself. Such new lines of research have questioned the former discourse of racial miscegenation, which has been replaced by the study of cultural negotiation in the colonial empire.

Studies about women in the XVI to XX century Portuguese colonial space are rare. There is some general bibliography, but actual studies that try to understand the History of women within a context of social marginalization and inferiority are still sparse. As an introduction, we may find Charles Boxer’s work on women and Iberian overseas expansion (1975). This is a concise, general and pioneer approach, that brings to the fore the different “types” of women, both European and “local”, that inhabit the four corners of the world. Boxer’s approach was widened during the conference on “The Female Face of Portuguese Expansion” (Oceanos nº 21, January/March, CNPCDP, 1995).

More recent works on female marginalization in Portuguese colonial spaces are those by Timothy Coates (“Deported Women and Orphans: 1550-1755”, Lisbon: CNPCDP, 1998), Ivo Carneiro de Sousa (“Slavery, Orphans and Nuptial Market: strategies of female education in Macao’s ‘Misericórdia’, XVI-XVIII centuries”, Revista de Cultura, Macao: 2003) and Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva (“Ladies and Plebeians in Colonial Society”, Lisbon: 2002), on women’s condition in colonial Brazil. But such lines of research are still limited in number, mainly as far as the study of women in Portuguese colonial Africa and Asia is concerned. Needless to say that comparative studies of such fields are almost inexistent. And that is precisely the aim of this project, which intends to study the rich sources provided by ‘Misericórdias’, shelter homes, convents and other collections of documents, as well as by historical literature, travel journals and colonial memoirs. We will analyse, under a comparative approach, the status of women in the Portuguese colonial spaces of Luanda, Rio de Janeiro, Goa and Dili, among many others, with a special focus on those groups of women and slaves, orphans and destitute, that, in the long term, played a major role in the social and cultural construction of local communities, as well as in the strategies of social domination and kinship alliances in the Portuguese colonial empire.
The I International Congress on Female Slavery, Orphanage and Poverty in the Portuguese Colonial Empire (XVI to XX centuries) took place in the campus of Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, state of Bahia, Brazil, between 29 August and 2 September 2005. A large group of Portuguese and Brazilian researchers delivered their conferences on subjects such as “History of the Portuguese Expansion in the Orient”; “Discourses of Colonization”; “Women in the End of Times: Nationalism, De-Colonization, Resistance and Everyday Life in XX Century Portuguese Africa”; “Representing Black Women in Brazilian Fiction”; “Slavery and Poverty in the Portuguese Empire”; “Cultural Journeys and Female Social Subalternity in Asia’s Portuguese Colonial Empire”, to name but a few.