Timeline

At the Xabregas tobacco factory, in Beato, the workforce was mostly female: an 1887 survey counted 74.9% women among the workers.¹ The women workers turned to women’s mutual aid associations, and in 1894 the Women’s Mutual Aid Association of Tobacco Day Workers was founded.¹ Only in 1927 would the company open a maternity clinic for the women tobacco workers next to the factory.¹

Ana de Castro Osório, a pioneer of the struggle for equal rights between men and women, publishes Às Mulheres Portuguesas (To Portuguese Women), considered the first Portuguese feminist manifesto.²¹

Carolina Beatriz Ângelo and four other women doctors — Adelaide Cabete, Domitila de Carvalho, Emília Patacho and Maria do Carmo Lopes — join the Portuguese committee of the French association La Paix et le Désarmement par les Femmes (Peace and Disarmament through Women); Carolina joins its board.¹²

By royal decree of 1906, the Liceu Maria Pia, the country’s first girls’ secondary school (liceu), is established in Lisbon.¹ The decree approving its organisation is dated 31 January and appears in the Diário do Governo (Government Gazette) of 23 February.³ Domitila de Carvalho was its first headmistress and taught Mathematics there.⁴ It is the forerunner of the Liceu Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, which only had a building of its own in 1933.¹

A group of educated women — intellectuals, doctors, writers and above all teachers — founds the Portuguese Group for Feminist Studies, to spread women’s emancipation, set up a library and publish studies.¹ It was led by Ana de Castro Osório; Carolina Beatriz Ângelo took part in its founding, and its members also included Maria Veleda and the doctors Sofia Quintino and Adelaide Cabete.³⁴ The Group gave evening classes for illiterate women at the Dr Afonso Costa Republican School Centre.² It was short-lived, but it was around it that the Republican League of Portuguese Women was born.¹

The illustrated magazine Alma Feminina (Feminine Soul) comes out, edited by the poet Albertina Paraíso, with Virgínia Quaresma as chief writer and editorial secretary.² It was in its pages that Virgínia Quaresma, for the first time in Portugal, put a woman factory worker in the spotlight.¹ The issue of 31 October 1907 put Carolina Beatriz Ângelo on its cover: “exceptionally intelligent”, said the caption.³

In 1908 the doctor Carolina Beatriz Ângelo joins the Republican League of Portuguese Women, where Ana de Castro Osório and Adelaide Cabete were also active.¹² The League championed women’s suffrage, but gave even more weight to reform of the Civil Code: divorce, the protection of children and the administration of the couple’s property.² Launched in August that year, it was only legally constituted in February 1909.³

Launched in August 1908 by Ana de Castro Osório and António José de Almeida, the Republican League of Portuguese Women is legally constituted in February 1909, as an association that was at once political and feminist, to educate women in democratic principles and to revise the laws that concerned them.¹⁴ Its headquarters were on the second floor of No. 6 Rua dos Castelinhos.³ Its governing bodies also included the doctors Carolina Beatriz Ângelo and Adelaide Cabete; Maria Veleda, a founding member, would preside over the League from 1911.⁴⁵ In April the first issue of its official organ, A Mulher e a Criança (Woman and Child), comes out.²

The revolution of 5 October 1910 puts an end to the Monarchy, and the Republic is proclaimed from the balcony of Lisbon City Hall.²⁸⁴ The doctors Carolina Beatriz Ângelo and Adelaide Cabete had made the green-and-red flags raised that day.³⁶⁵ A postcard of the time celebrates Amélia Santos as the “heroine of the Rotunda”.⁴

Three weeks after the revolution, the general assembly of the Republican League of Portuguese Women, led by Ana de Castro Osório, considers the petition of feminist demands to be delivered to the Provisional Government; Virgínia Quaresma is one of the speakers.¹²⁴ On a motion by Maria Veleda, the assembly thanks the newspaper A Capital for opening its columns to the League’s propaganda.² The next day, at 13:00, a committee of members delivers the petition to the President of the Provisional Government.²

A committee of members of the Republican League of Portuguese Women delivers to the President of the Provisional Government a “wide-ranging petition of feminist demands”.⁴⁵ Among them was the vote: the League considered universal suffrage just but, “so as in no way to hinder the government of the Republic”, for now it asked for the vote only for women who were traders, industrialists, civil servants, graduates, writers or administrators of fortunes.³ The League was then led by Ana de Castro Osório and, as vice-president, Carolina Beatriz Ângelo.¹³⁵

Less than a month after the revolution, the Provisional Government publishes the decree with the force of law of 3 November 1910, which introduces divorce, both contested and by mutual consent, and creates a new civil status, that of “divorced”.¹² According to the Assembly of the Republic, Portugal becomes the second European country, after Norway, to allow divorce by mutual consent; the law treats the husband’s adultery and the wife’s in the same terms.¹³ The feminist Ana de Castro Osório worked with the Minister of Justice, Afonso Costa, on preparing the law, for which the journalist Virgínia Quaresma had campaigned in 1909.⁶⁸

Shortly after the divorce law, the Ministry of Justice promulgates the so-called Family Laws: Decree No. 1, on marriage as a civil contract, and No. 2, on the protection of children.¹² “The marital partnership is based on freedom and equality”, says Article 39 of the first.¹ The wife’s duty of obedience to her husband comes to an end, a woman author can now publish freely, and the unmarried mother gains the means to establish paternity.¹

The Republican League of Portuguese Women takes to Teófilo Braga, President of the Provisional Government, a new petition asking for the vote for women “who, by their special position, should be able to exercise it”: taxpayers, those with a scientific or literary profession, and those who were morally and economically independent.³ Heading the signatures was the doctor Carolina Beatriz Ângelo, followed by Ana de Castro Osório, Adelaide da Cunha Barradas, Constança Dias, Joana de Almeida Nogueira, Maria Laura Monteiro Torres, Rita Dantas Machado and Virgínia da Fonseca.³² Teófilo Braga undertook to present it at the first meeting of ministers.³

Published on 14 March 1911 and drafted by the Minister of the Interior, António José de Almeida, the “Electoral law for the election of deputies to the Constituent Assembly” (Lei eleitoral para servir na eleição de deputados à Assembleia Constituinte) gives the vote to Portuguese citizens over 21 who can read and write or are heads of household — without saying they had to be men.¹⁴ The feminists at first saw it as a disappointment, because it did not enshrine women’s right to vote; then they realised that it did not deny it either, and Carolina Beatriz Ângelo asked to be registered as a voter.⁴ The law was amended by a decree of 5 April and supplemented by decrees of 20 April and of 11, 12 and 13 May 1911.¹³

A widow and head of household, with a minor daughter in her care, Carolina Beatriz Ângelo applies to the registration committee of Lisbon’s 2nd District to be entered on the electoral rolls, in an application dated 1 April 1911.⁴¹ The committee declares itself not competent and refers the request to the Minister of the Interior, António José de Almeida, who turns it down.⁴³ Carolina then appeals to the courts.³

On 24 April, Carolina Beatriz Ângelo lodges her appeal against exclusion from the electoral register at the Boa-Hora Court; the case falls to the judge of the 1st Civil Court, João Baptista de Castro, father of Ana de Castro Osório.⁶² In his ruling of 28 April, he decides that the law, in speaking of “portugueses” (the Portuguese), includes women, and orders Carolina to be entered on the register: “where the law does not distinguish, the judge may not distinguish” (onde a lei não distingue não pode o julgador distinguir).⁶ A Capital of 29 April publishes the ruling and calls it “a victory for national feminism”.¹

Disagreements within the Republican League of Portuguese Women over who should vote — only educated women with a profession, or all women, without restrictions — lead to the founding of the Feminist Propaganda Association on 12 May 1911.¹² Ana de Castro Osório and Carolina Beatriz Ângelo were among the supporters of a restricted vote; Maria Veleda, who became president of the League that year, argued for the vote without restrictions.¹⁶ The new association was born in Carolina Beatriz Ângelo’s consulting rooms, and she was its president, according to Toponímia de Lisboa.⁷⁴

On Sunday morning, the doctor Carolina Beatriz Ângelo votes in the elections to the National Constituent Assembly, at the São Jorge de Arroios polling station, set up in the Clube Estefânia: she is the first woman to vote in Portugal.⁸⁷ A widow and head of household, she had been registered as voter No. 2513 by order of a judge, because the electoral law did not expressly exclude women.⁴ The presiding officer still consulted the other members of the polling board before accepting her ballot; she voted to applause, accompanied by Ana de Castro Osório.⁴¹⁸ In 1911 there were few European countries where women voted — Finland, which the Assembly of the Republic gives as the only one, and Norway, since 1907, only for women with a certain income — and the news spread across the continent.¹⁹

A petition from the Feminist Propaganda Association asking for women’s suffrage is submitted to the National Constituent Assembly.¹ Approved at a general assembly on 10 July and headed by Carolina Beatriz Ângelo, who had led the association since Ana de Castro Osório left for Brazil, it asked for the vote for women graduates, women heads of household and women traders who could read and write.³ On 26 July the article on women’s civil and political rights is removed from the draft Constitution; on the 27th, Bernardino Machado says the question “is not constitutional”.¹²

At the session of 26 July 1911, two days after a petition from the Feminist Propaganda Association was submitted, the National Constituent Assembly removes from the draft Constitution the article on women’s civil and political rights.¹² The deputy António Macieira opposed promising women a “progressive education” for the exercise of political and civil capacity — the Republic, he recalled, had already given them divorce and the freedom to publish their writings — and Faustino da Fonseca argued that the Republic “must not deny women the right to vote”.²³ The next day, Bernardino Machado declared that the matter was not a constitutional one and should be left to ordinary law.¹

The National Constituent Assembly, which sat from 15 June to 25 August 1911, approves the Constitution of 21 August, the Republic’s first.¹² The text did not enshrine women’s right to vote — the article on their rights had been removed from the draft — and left the organisation of elections to a special law.³ The Congress of the Republic, made up of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, begins sitting on 26 August.¹

Aged 33, Carolina Beatriz Ângelo is taken ill on the tram, returning from a meeting of feminists she had chaired, and dies on the stairs of her home.¹ A freethinker, she had left written instructions that she wanted a civil burial and that her family, above all her daughter, should not wear mourning.⁴¹ Adelaide Cabete calls on women to attend the funeral.¹

The Feminist Propaganda Association launches the magazine A Mulher Portuguesa (The Portuguese Woman), of which five issues would come out, from June 1912 to February 1913.¹ Issue No. 1 publishes the letter from Ana de Castro Osório, written in São Paulo and read at the session of 12 May 1912, on the association’s first anniversary: “Our Association was formed in struggle”.² In it she accused the Constituent Assembly of having set aside the question of women’s right to vote, “considering it untimely”.⁴

On 3 July 1912, in the midst of the debate on the Electoral Code, the Senate receives a petition from the Union of Socialist Women against the refusal of the vote to women, recalling the promises the republicans had made in opposition.¹ On the 9th comes the petition from the Republican League of Portuguese Women, then presided over by Maria Veleda.¹² Senator João de Freitas replies that the League brings together “only a few hundred women” and that the great mass of Portuguese women is indifferent to the vote.¹

In the midst of the debate on the Electoral Code, the Republican League of Portuguese Women delivers a petition for the law to enshrine women’s right to vote, days after the Senate had received a petition from the Union of Socialist Women.¹ In the debate, several senators were opposed, citing the Church’s influence over women; others would accept only the vote of women graduates.¹ On 2 July the Senate had actually approved an amendment giving the vote to women over 25 with a higher, secondary or special education — but the Chamber of Deputies did not follow suit, and the 1913 Electoral Code reserved the vote for men.²

Law No. 3 of 3 July 1913 defines as voters only citizens “of the male sex” over 21 who could read and write, closing the legal loophole through which Carolina Beatriz Ângelo had voted in 1911.¹⁷ The Senate had approved the vote for women graduates, but the Chamber of Deputies rejected it.⁸ Women would wait almost twenty years for a vote — and even then a restricted one.¹

With special authorisation from the Supreme Court of Justice, Regina Quintanilha makes her debut as a lawyer at the Boa-Hora Court, defending women defendants — the first woman to practise law in Portugal.³¹ The newspaper A Luta wrote that she spoke “with great brilliance”.¹ The legal profession would only be opened to women by law in 1918, with Decree No. 4676.³

On the initiative of the doctor Adelaide Cabete, who would preside over it for more than twenty years, the National Council of Portuguese Women is born.¹² For 32 years its headquarters were her consulting rooms, on the first floor of No. 13 Praça dos Restauradores.¹ In November the first issue of its Boletim Oficial (Official Bulletin) comes out, edited by Maria Clara Correia Alves.³ It would be the most important and longest-lasting Portuguese feminist association of the first half of the 20th century.¹⁵

Called by the Seamstresses and Stitchers’ trade association, based on Rua do Benformoso, more than a hundred women workers from the Ramiro Leão & C.ª factory, on the Santana hill, go to a union meeting.¹ Three of them — Miquelina Furtado, Laurinda Pinheiro and Lúcia Martins — are dismissed for sitting on a committee for the 8-hour working day, and their colleagues strike at the factory gate until they are dispersed by GNR cavalry and infantry.¹ Twelve women workers resign in solidarity with those dismissed.¹

A group of women presided over by Elzira Dantas Machado, wife of President Bernardino Machado, creates the Crusade of Portuguese Women, to provide moral and material assistance to whoever needed it because of the war with Germany.¹² It grew out of the Women’s Committee “Pela Pátria” (For the Homeland), of which Ana de Castro Osório had been a founder.³² In 1917 it organised nursing courses for the military hospitals at home and on the European front, run at first by the doctor Sofia Quintino.¹² The journalist Virgínia Quaresma placed the news agency she ran in Lisbon at the Crusade’s service.⁴

The National Council of Portuguese Women launches the bulletin Alma Feminina (Feminine Soul), which would be published until May 1946.¹ The first issue, of January 1917, is edited by Maria Clara Correia Alves, who had already edited the Council’s Boletim Oficial (Official Bulletin).¹² Later editors included Adelaide Cabete and, in 1929–1930, the jurist Elina Guimarães.³²

The republican and socialist propagandist Angelina Vidal dies in near-destitution at No. 41 Rua de São Gens, in Graça.¹ The day before, she had been granted the survivor’s pension for the death of her husband, a Navy doctor, which the monarchy had refused her for being an “enemy of the institutions”.¹ In 1924 Lisbon would name a street after her.¹

Decree No. 4676 of 19 July 1918, issued by Sidónio Pais’s government, allows women law graduates to practise as lawyers and to work as assistants to notaries and registrars, and opens posts in public offices to them.²¹ It stipulates, however, that there are “functions of direction and initiative” reserved for men, and it does not give women the vote.²³ Regina Quintanilha had been practising law since 1913, with special authorisation; Aurora de Castro e Gouveia took advantage of the decree to practise law and become the country’s first woman notary.²³

The first issue of A Batalha (The Battle) comes out, “mouthpiece of the Portuguese workers’ organisation”, owned by the National Workers’ Union; from September 1919 it would be the organ of the General Confederation of Labour.¹ Under the Military Dictatorship, its offices are destroyed and looted and publication is interrupted; it would come out again after 25 April, in the hands of Emídio Santana.¹

According to the feminist jurist Elina Guimarães, the restrictions in the Civil Code that prevented women from standing surety, acting as witnesses to deeds, being guardians or sitting on family councils were abolished by a law of 1917, ratified in 1918, and removed from the text of the Code in 1930.¹ The 1910 Family Laws had left them standing.¹

In a period of great social unrest, under the impact of the Russian Revolution and the end of the First World War, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), an anarcho-syndicalist workers’ confederation, is founded; the newspaper A Batalha becomes its organ.¹ Under the Republic and the Military Dictatorship, the CGT would lead many workers’ struggles and see many of its activists imprisoned and deported.¹

At a meeting at the headquarters of the Office Workers’ Association, in Lisbon, the Portuguese Communist Party is founded, under the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917.¹ Outlawed after the coup of 28 May 1926, it would live underground until 25 April 1974.¹

The first issue of Seara Nova (New Harvest) comes out, a magazine of intellectuals “detached from political parties but not from political life”, who set out to impose the reforms the nation needed, above patronage and oligarchies.¹² Among the “seareiros” (harvesters) were Jaime Cortesão, Raul Proença, António Sérgio and Aquilino Ribeiro.¹ Hit by censorship, it stopped circulating between August 1926 and April 1927; when it returned, much of its editorial board and many of its contributors were in prison or in exile.²

To mark its tenth anniversary, the National Council of Portuguese Women, presided over by Adelaide Cabete, organises the country’s first feminist congress, in the great hall of the Mutual Aid Association of Commercial Employees of Lisbon; it is opened by the President of the Republic, Manuel Teixeira Gomes.¹²⁴ The notary Aurora de Castro e Gouveia calls for full political equality and the vote; the speakers also include Deolinda Lopes Vieira, Maria O'Neill, Angélica Viana Porto and Regina Quintanilha.³⁴ It produced proposals that were very advanced for the time: a month’s rest before childbirth for working women, sex education in schools, equal pay for equal work, legal equality between spouses and votes for women.⁴

By edict of 17 October 1924, the old Caminho do Forno do Tijolo is renamed Rua Angelina Vidal, with the caption “Distinguished Lecturer and Propagandist of Social Emancipation” (Ilustre Conferencista e Propagandista da Emancipação Social).¹ It was one of 14 women’s names given to streets by republican Lisbon between 1910 and 1926.² Angelina Vidal had died in 1917, in near-destitution, in Graça.¹

The military coup that began in Braga on 28 May 1926 overthrows the parliamentary Republic and opens the Military Dictatorship (1926–1933), from within which Salazar and the Estado Novo (“New State”) would emerge.¹² In Lisbon, a military force closes Parliament.² Years of revolts and repression follow, with hundreds dead and thousands of political prisoners and deportees.¹

Less than a month after the coup of 28 May, the press censorship services start operating in the GNR barracks at Carmo, where they remain until 1934.¹ Six other addresses would follow, in the Chiado, the Bairro Alto and Restauradores — between 1947 and 1961, in the Palácio Foz — until Rua da Misericórdia, where the censorship office was on 25 April 1974.¹

After decades of complaints — Adelaide Cabete had called for crèches in factories in her medical thesis — the National Tobacco Company opens a maternity clinic next to the Xabregas factory, for the women tobacco workers and the wives of the male workers.¹ There were consultations for mothers and children, milk for babies, free admission for a month before and a month after childbirth, and a crèche.¹ The women workers of this factory had founded a women’s mutual aid association in 1894.¹

The first great revolt of the “reviralho” (turnaround) against the Military Dictatorship begins in Porto on 3 February, led by soldiers and civilians such as Sousa Dias, Jaime de Morais and Jaime Cortesão, and only reaches Lisbon on the 7th.¹ The rebels surrender in Porto and, late in the afternoon of the 9th, in Lisbon.¹ There follow dismissals of civil servants, the dissolution of Army and GNR units, hundreds of prisoners and deportees, executions by firing squad and the exile of many republicans, who in France would form the League for the Defence of the Republic.¹

Begun in Porto on 3 February, the revolt only spreads to Lisbon on the 7th: sailors, GNR companies and armed civilians, commanded by men such as Mendes dos Reis and Agatão Lança, put up barricades on Rua Alexandre Herculano, in Largo do Rato and on Rua de São Filipe Néri.¹ They surrender late in the afternoon of 9 February; that day, by the fountain in Largo do Rato, several civilians and sailors were executed by firing squad.¹² The repression that followed created, in March, a Special Information Police, the embryo of the political police of the Estado Novo (“New State”).²

After the defeat of the February revolt, exiled republicans — among them António Sérgio, Afonso Costa, José Domingues dos Santos, Álvaro de Castro and Jaime Cortesão — organise, first in Galicia and then in Paris, the League for the Defence of the Republic, known as the Paris League.¹ Its founding document, Ao País (To the Country), drafted by António Sérgio, is made public in July 1927: it called for the reform of parliamentary institutions, public life, the economy and education.¹

Two years after the coup, Aljube Prison becomes a political prison for male prisoners and serves as a “turntable” for those on their way to deportation.²¹ In 1934 it comes under the direct administration of the PVDE, as the prison for those held on remand; in 1935 the communal cells are partitioned and the visiting room gets a mesh screen between prisoners and visitors.²³ From 1943 it has thirteen isolation cells, the “curros”.²

At the invitation of the writer Ferreira de Castro, Maria Lamas becomes editor of Modas e Bordados (Fashions and Embroidery), a supplement of O Século, and makes the magazine profitable by speaking “from woman to woman”.¹⁴ She would edit it until 1947, when she had to choose between the magazine and the National Council of Portuguese Women.³¹

General Óscar Carmona, the sole candidate, is elected President of the Republic by direct suffrage; only male citizens over 21 voted.¹ The following month, to resolve the financial crisis, the dictatorship brings Salazar into the government.¹

To resolve the crisis in the public accounts, the Military Dictatorship brings into the Government António de Oliveira Salazar, professor of Economics and Finance at Coimbra, a leading figure in the Catholic Centre, with a reputation as a “financial wizard”.² He takes office on 27 April 1928 and, in his inaugural speech, declares that he knows very well what he wants and where he is going.¹² It was the beginning of the long march to power that would take him, in 1932, to the presidency of the Council (head of government).²

Now under the dictatorship, the National Council of Portuguese Women holds the Second Feminist and Education Congress; the opening session, with Adelaide Cabete and Angélica Viana Porto on the platform, is chaired by the Spanish doctor Elisa Soriano, with no government representative present.¹ There were twelve papers, by ten women, and those on political and civil rights outnumbered those on education.¹ Maria O'Neill presented the paper “Votes for women” (O voto às mulheres), and Elina Guimarães argued for the protection of working women.⁴⁷¹ Deolinda Lopes Vieira, of the organising committee, argued for the “Single School” (Escola Única) and co-education, which the dictatorship had abolished in primary schools the year before.⁶

On the initiative of Maria Lamas, the exhibition “Mulheres Portuguesas — Exposição da Obra Feminina, Antiga e Moderna” (Portuguese Women — Exhibition of Women’s Work, Old and Modern) opens on 17 May in eleven rooms of the newspaper O Século, under the motto “Let us be women, intelligently” (Sejamos inteligentemente mulheres).⁵¹ It showed the work of women from all over the country, from craftswomen to intellectuals, and recreated the salons of Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho and Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos.⁵⁴ It was organised with the National Council of Portuguese Women.⁴

Minister of Finance of the Military Dictatorship and, on an interim basis, Minister of the Colonies, Salazar has the Colonial Act enacted, which centralises the administration of the empire in Lisbon and subordinates the interests of the colonies to those of the metropole.¹ “It is of the organic essence of the Portuguese Nation to fulfil the historic function of possessing and colonising overseas domains”, said Article 2.¹ The act would be incorporated into the 1933 Constitution.¹

The Military Dictatorship recognises the vote for some women for the first time: Decree No. 19 694 of 5 May gives it to women heads of household, for parish councils, and Decree No. 20 073 of 15 July to those with secondary or higher education, for municipal councils.¹²⁷ In this first phase, women’s vote applied only to parish councils and municipal councils.⁵ This closed a gap of almost twenty years since the 1913 Electoral Code.³

The first issue of Avante! (Forward!) comes out, the central organ of the Portuguese Communist Party, addressed to the “proletariat of Portugal” and printed on clandestine presses.¹ Publication was irregular and at one point stopped for two years; resumed in August 1941, it was not interrupted again until 25 April.¹ The first legal Avante! came out on 17 May 1974.¹

Diário da Manhã (Morning Daily) comes out in Lisbon, edited by Domingos Garcia Pulido, in the former offices of the republican newspaper O Mundo, on Rua da Misericórdia. Its first editorial calls it a “republican newspaper”, but it would be the semi-official organ and indoctrination vehicle of the National Union, increasingly devoted to the cult of Salazar.¹ The last issue comes out on 30 January 1971, with Marcelo Caetano already in government; it is succeeded by Época.¹

The PSP and the GNR open fire to put down the May Day (1 May) demonstrations in Lisbon: dozens wounded and at least four dead — a bricklayer’s labourer employed by the City Council, a Shell employee, a hardware shop assistant hit behind his counter and the owner of a hotel on Rua do Comércio, hit at his window.¹ It was the high point of a year of strikes and revolts against the Military Dictatorship.²

Under the dictatorship, Decree No. 19 694, which organises electoral registration, has the members of parish councils elected by heads of household “of either sex”.¹ Women count as heads of household if they are widowed, divorced or judicially separated, with a family of their own, or married with the husband absent in the colonies or abroad.¹³ It is women’s first vote, still only for parish councils.³ In July, Decree No. 20 073 would give women with secondary or higher education the vote for municipal councils.²

Decree No. 20 073 extends the vote for parish councils to single women who are of age or emancipated, “with a family of their own and recognised moral probity”, and gives the vote for municipal councils to Portuguese women who are of age or emancipated and have secondary or higher education.¹ It came almost twenty years after the 1913 Electoral Code had reserved the vote for men.²³ It was a very restricted vote, and it did not reach parliament: it applied to parish councils and municipal councils.⁴

Soldiers and civilians rise up in Lisbon against the Military Dictatorship, with airmen from the Alverca Air Base; they take up positions from the top of Parque Eduardo VII to Largo do Rato and attack the barracks of Caçadores 5 (Light Infantry), in Campolide, which remains loyal to the government.¹⁵ The fighting leaves some 40 dead, and the rebels taken prisoner are taken to the Civil Government, on Rua Capelo.¹ On 2 September, 358 deportees, among them the military leaders of the revolt, embark on the ship Pedro Gomes for Timor.²

Minister of Finance since 1928, and with a predominant influence in General Domingos de Oliveira’s government since January 1930, Oliveira Salazar becomes head of government on 5 July 1932, and paves the way for the institutionalisation of the Estado Novo (“New State”), which the 1933 Constitution would enshrine.¹

Decree No. 21 942 creates the Special Military Courts, in Lisbon and Porto, to try political crimes, with sentences of banishment to be served “in a penal colony established on an island in the colonies”.¹ In Lisbon, prisoners often awaited trial in the cells of the 1st Police Station, at the Civil Government, where trials were also held.² In 1945 they would give way to the Plenary Courts.¹

Heir to the Liceu Maria Pia, the Liceu Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho moves into the building on Rua Rodrigo da Fonseca designed by Miguel Ventura Terra — the first to be purpose-built for a girls’ secondary school.¹³ Maria Guardiola had been headmistress since 1928, and Domitila de Carvalho, the Maria Pia’s first headmistress, was still teaching Mathematics there.²⁴ The following year, both would be elected among the first three women deputies.²

Approved by plebiscite on 19 March — with abstentions counted as votes in favour — the 1933 Constitution comes into force on 11 April and establishes the Estado Novo (“New State”).¹² Article 5 declares everyone equal before the law, “save, as regards women, the differences resulting from their nature and from the good of the family”, a formula that justified the legal inequality of women.³⁴ On the same day the decree on prior censorship is published.⁵

On the day the new Constitution comes into force, Decree-Law No. 22 469 regulates the prior censorship of periodicals, to prevent the “perversion of public opinion”.¹ In June the Directorate-General of Censorship Services is created, which at the time worked in the GNR barracks at Carmo.¹³ Censorship would extend to books, shows, radio and cinema, and would only be abolished after 25 April.¹²

Decree-Law No. 22 992 of 29 August creates the State Surveillance and Defence Police (PVDE), the political police that bore that name until 1945, when it gave way to the PIDE.¹³ The regime opts for harsher repression to break the resistance.² The headquarters on Rua António Maria Cardoso only became fully operational from 1938; until then, much of the violence and torture took place in PSP police stations, almost always in coordination with the Aljube.⁵

Inspired by Mussolini’s Carta del Lavoro (Labour Charter), the National Labour Statute imposes the corporative model and the “fascisation” of the trade unions; together with the Constitution, it bans strikes and lockouts.²¹ The workers’ response was the general strike of 18 January 1934.² Strikes would only become legal again with Decree-Law No. 392/74.¹

Decree-Law No. 23 054 creates, attached to the Presidency of the Council, the National Propaganda Secretariat, whose mission included “combating by every means” the penetration into the country of “any ideas that disturb and dissolve national unity and interest” and using radio, cinema and theatre as “indispensable means for its action”.¹ Run by António Ferro, it was a central part of the regime’s propaganda machine.²⁴ In 1940 the State buys the Palácio Foz, in Restauradores, for its headquarters.³ In 1944 a decree-law concentrates the propaganda, tourism, press and censorship services in the National Information Secretariat, which succeeded it.⁵

Brought from Peniche Fort, 150 prisoners — soldiers and civilians, republican rebels of the “reviralho”, trade unionists, anarchists and communists, tried and convicted by a military court — are deported to the fortress of São João Baptista, in Angra do Heroísmo.¹ It was the first batch since the fortress had become a political police prison, three months after the creation of the PVDE.¹

Anarcho-syndicalists, communists and socialists call a general strike against the “fascisation” of the trade unions imposed by the National Labour Statute.¹ In Lisbon a bomb goes off at Poço do Bispo and the railway line is cut at Xabregas; in Marinha Grande, the glassworkers occupy the GNR post and the town hall.¹ Prisoners such as António Gato Pinto pass through the cells of the Civil Government and the Aljube; several participants would die in Tarrafal, among them Bento Gonçalves and Mário Castelhano.³¹ That year, the PVDE takes over the direct administration of the political prisons — the Aljube, Peniche and Angra — and in January 1935 also the South Redoubt of Caxias.⁴

The First Portuguese Colonial Exhibition opens in Porto, curated by Henrique Galvão, an army officer who would become a prominent opponent of Salazarism.¹ A moment of imperial exaltation, the exhibition included “human zoos”, in which men, women and children from the colonies were displayed to the public in their supposed “habitats”.¹

The new electoral law of the Estado Novo (“New State”) defines who can be elected to the National Assembly — Portuguese citizens with electoral capacity who can read and write — considers as a voter anyone on the electoral register, and sets the first election for 16 December 1934.¹ Those who could not be elected included anyone imprisoned for political or social offences.¹ According to the historian Irene Flunser Pimentel, the women who could vote and be elected were single women over 21 who had their own income or who worked, women heads of household, and married women with a secondary school diploma or who paid a certain amount of property tax.² In the December elections the first three women deputies would be elected.²

In the elections of 16 December 1934, the National Union list takes the first three Portuguese women deputies to the National Assembly: the teacher and doctor Domitila de Carvalho, the lawyer Maria Cândida Parreira and the teacher Maria Guardiola.¹² They sat mainly on the labour and welfare committee and the education committee, as these were considered matters “more connected with women’s interests”.¹ It was not the First Republic that opened the doors of parliament to women, but Salazar’s regime, which saw in them a means of spreading the ideology of the Estado Novo (“New State”).¹ The Assembly opened on 11 January 1935.³

The South Redoubt of Caxias Fort, a prison since 1916, comes under the PVDE’s control, for male prisoners.¹ Caxias thus joins the Aljube as a political prison in the Lisbon area; in 1938, the North Redoubt would become the women’s prison.¹

Elected in December 1934, the National Assembly of the Estado Novo (“New State”) meets for the first time at the Palácio de São Bento, with the arrival of the President of the Republic, Óscar Carmona, and of Salazar.¹² Among the deputies are the first three women elected to a parliament in Portugal: Domitila de Carvalho, Maria Cândida Parreira and Maria Guardiola.³⁶ According to the Assembly of the Republic, only women with a special, secondary or higher education had been able to vote.⁴

Decree-Law No. 25 495 creates the National Foundation for Joy at Work, to promote “the use of the free time of Portuguese workers”: everything that might “strengthen, educate and entertain the body and spirit of those who work” was to be treated with “special care”.¹ It followed the model of Mussolini’s Dopolavoro and Hitler’s “Strength through Joy”, and served the members of the national syndicates, the Casas do Povo (People’s Houses) and the Casas de Pescadores (Fishermen’s Houses).² In 1946 it set up its headquarters in the Palácio Camarido, on Calçada de Santana, and in 1959 it opened its stadium in Alvalade, today the Estádio 1.º de Maio (May Day Stadium); in 1975 it was renamed INATEL.³²

The Portuguese Women’s Association for Peace is established, with its headquarters in Lisbon, first on Rua do Loreto and then on Rua Latino Coelho.¹ It presented itself as non-political and non-religious, but it brought together anti-fascist and anti-war women, from Stella Piteira Santos and Maria Alda Nogueira to Isabel Aboim Inglez and Manuela Porto.⁴³ Maria Lamas was its president from 1938.² It was dissolved in 1952, by order of the Minister of the Interior.¹

Law No. 1941 of 11 April 1936 creates the Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa), the organisation through which the regime regimented young people.¹ The Women’s Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina) would be created by Decree-Law No. 28 262 of 8 December 1937, according to the historian Irene Pimentel.³ The Mocidade would have its headquarters in the Palácio da Independência, on Largo de São Domingos, until 1974.² Both were abolished by Decree-Law No. 171/74, on 25 April 1974 itself.¹

Decree-Law No. 26 539 creates the “penal colony for political and social prisoners” of Tarrafal, on the island of Santiago, in Cape Verde — the “Camp of Slow Death” (Campo da Morte Lenta).¹ The camp doctor, Esmeraldo Pais, used to say: “I am not here to cure, but to sign death certificates”.¹ The camp received its first prisoners on 29 October 1936; until it closed, in 1954, 340 passed through it, and 34 died there.¹

Franco’s military uprising against the Spanish Republic starts the Spanish Civil War.¹ Salazar supports Franco, and between 1936 and 1939 the Portuguese dictatorship goes through one of its most violent periods: 9,575 arrests made by the political police and 38 known deaths, most of them in the prisons and in Tarrafal.¹

A popular protest against the dairy monopoly, the revolt goes on for more than a month and results in 557 arrests and 7 deaths.¹ In June 1937, ten women from Ribeira Brava — Ludovina de Jesus da Corte, Agostinha da Câmara, Francisca Andrade, Maria de Jesus Silva, Maria Rosa de Abreu, Maria de Jesus Andrade, Conceição da Câmara Rodrigues, Tereza da Corte, Virgínia de Jesus and Maria de Souza — are sent to the Mónicas Prison, in Lisbon.¹ The prisoners taken to the mainland were held for between two and three years.¹

Decree No. 26 893 approves the statutes of the Mothers’ Work for National Education (OMEN), set up under the patronage of the Ministry of National Education to “stimulate the educational action of the family”. Its aims included “guiding Portuguese mothers” in bringing up their children, promoting “the comfort of the home”, “defending good morals, namely as regards dress, reading and entertainment” and organising the women’s section of the Portuguese Youth.¹ It spread the role the regime assigned to women: mothers devoted to the family and to housework, wives obedient to their husbands, the “head” of the family.² Maria Guardiola was its vice-president from 1937 until it was abolished, in 1975.³

Sailors from the ships Afonso de Albuquerque, Dão and Bartolomeu Dias, organised by the Revolutionary Organisation of the Navy, linked to the PCP, rise up on the Tagus against the dictatorship.¹ Salazar has the ships shelled: there are 12 dead and 208 arrested, and 34 sailors go with the first contingent to Tarrafal.¹ Most only got out when the camp closed, in 1954; five died there.¹

Decree-Law No. 27 058 of 30 September 1936 creates the Portuguese Legion, the regime’s militia.¹ On 25 April 1974 it was the first paramilitary force to surrender, and Decree-Law No. 171/74 abolished it.²¹

Handed over to the PVDE after the revolt of 8 September, the imprisoned sailors were held at the police post of the “Mitra”, in eastern Lisbon, and from 18 September in the Penitentiary.¹² Sentenced by the Special Military Court, on 17 October they boarded the ship that left the next day for the newly created camp at Tarrafal.²³ Among them were the gunner Francisco José Pereira, who in September 1937 was the first deportee to die in the camp, and the sailor Jacinto de Melo Faria Vilaça, who died there in 1941, aged 26.¹²

Having left Lisbon on 18 October in the holds of the ship Luanda, the first 152 deportees — among them participants in the general strike of 18 January 1934 and the Sailors’ Revolt — arrive at the Tarrafal camp after a twelve-day voyage.¹ The camp was designed to isolate them from the world, in subhuman conditions of captivity, ill-treatment, forced labour and torture.¹

Decree-Law No. 27 279, which lays down the foundations of primary education, provides in Article 9 that “women teachers may not marry without the authorisation of the Minister of National Education”, who will only give it if the bridegroom has “good moral and civil conduct” and “salary or income, documented, in keeping with the teacher’s salary”.¹ The same law demands “irreproachable moral conduct” from those who teach and makes it compulsory for primary school pupils to be enrolled in the Portuguese Youth.¹ The authorisation only ceased to be required in December 1969.²

In solidarity with republican Spain, anarchists set off bombs at the Ministry of National Education, the Emissora Nacional, the Rádio Clube Português and the Casa de Espanha, among other targets; the next day devices go off at the Ministry of War.¹ The targets were chosen through contacts of the anarchist Emídio Santana.¹ Their enthusiasm would lead the anarchists to the attempt on Salazar’s life, in July.¹

On Sunday morning, a bomb hidden in a sewer on Avenida Barbosa du Bocage explodes as the car arrives carrying Salazar, who was on his way to Mass at Josué Trocado’s private chapel; through an error of a few centimetres, it blows in the wrong direction, and the dictator escapes unhurt.¹² The attack is attributed to anarchists such as Emídio Santana, linked to other members of the Popular Front.¹⁴ The PVDE arrests and tortures innocent people; two of them, José Lopes da Silva and Jacinto Estêvão de Carvalho, die.¹

Francisco de Paula Oliveira Júnior, “Pavel”, general secretary of the PCP, arrested on 10 January 1938 in his clandestine house, escapes from the Aljube with the help of the nurse Augusto Rodrigues, who joins the escape along with another, very sick prisoner, “Casanova”.¹ Hidden on a Norwegian boat, they head for Paris; Pavel would end up in exile in Mexico, where he was a journalist, writer and art critic, and a friend of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.¹

The North Redoubt of Caxias Fort comes under the control of the political police, for women.¹ The women prisoners served their entire remand and their sentences there, two by two in rooms, with exercise time only with the same companion.² Some had their young children with them, or children born in prison; at visits, through a pane of glass, they could not hug them.²

Decree No. 28 794 provides that nursing and domestic service posts filled by women may only be taken by single women or childless widows, “who shall be replaced as soon as these conditions cease to be met”.¹² So begins the nurses’ 25-year struggle, which only ended with Decree-Law No. 44 923 of March 1963.¹

A few days before Madrid falls to Franco’s forces, Salazar and Franco sign the Iberian Pact, which seals the alliance between the two dictatorships.¹ During the Civil War, the “Viriatos”, Portuguese militias organised by Jorge Botelho Moniz, fought on Franco’s side, the Portuguese political police handed over republican refugees, and the Rádio Clube Português, founded by Botelho Moniz, broadcast to encourage Franco’s forces.¹

Arrested in Leiria because of O Quarto Dia (The Fourth Day), one of the volumes of A Criação do Mundo (The Creation of the World), seized that year, the writer Miguel Torga spends three months in the cells of the Aljube.¹² There he writes the poem “Canção” (Song), dated 30 December 1939: “It lacks freedom. Only that pain hurts it.” (Falta-lhe a liberdade. Só essa dor lhe dói.)¹

The Concordat signed on 7 May 1940 between Portugal and the Holy See restores civil effects to Catholic marriage and bans divorce for those who marry in church from then on; those who had married before, even in church, and those who married only in a civil ceremony could still divorce.¹³⁴ Thirty years after the 1910 Divorce Law, which had allowed both contested divorce and divorce by mutual consent, Catholic marriages became indissoluble once more.³ The ban applied to both spouses, but weighed far more heavily on the wife, the socially, economically and legally weaker party.² Only the 1975 Additional Protocol gave divorce back to those married in church.¹⁴

To celebrate the “double centenary” — of the founding of the kingdom, in 1140, and of the Restoration, in 1640 — the Estado Novo (“New State”) opens in Belém, the day after the armistice between France and Germany, the regime’s great propaganda event, around the new Praça do Império and the first Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries).¹² It has a historical section, a section of metropolitan ethnography, with replicas of Portuguese villages, and a Colonial Section, in the Colonial Garden; visits up to its closure, on 2 December, are estimated at three million.¹

In the Colonial Garden the Colonial Section of the Exhibition of the Portuguese World opens, directed by Henrique Galvão: among pavilions and replica villages, 138 men, women and children recruited in the colonies live in full view of visitors, in a “human zoo”, as the historian Cláudia Castelo calls it.¹ Among them are the King of Kongo, Dom Pedro VII, with the queen and the princess; Verónica, the wife of a Timorese chief; and Chopi women from Mozambique, photographed at a sewing class given by a missionary nun.¹ The Bijagós people from Guinea are placed on the island in one of the lakes.² In October, the executive committee decides to send them home before the winter, citing health reasons.¹

In a time of hunger and rationing, with the Second World War opening the first great crisis of the Estado Novo (“New State”), the woollen mill workers of Covilhã go on strike — one of the first signs of the workers’ struggles to come.¹ Felisberto Fernandes Berto, who stood out in the struggle, was arrested and taken to the Aljube and Caxias prisons, and died in the Hospital do Desterro, in Lisbon, on 20 December 1941.¹ Ferreira de Castro evoked the strike in the novel A Lã e a Neve (Wool and Snow), published in 1947.¹

On the second floor of the Aljube, thirteen isolation cells are built, the “curros” or “gavetas” (drawers): about one metre wide by two long, closed by two doors and almost all in half-darkness 24 hours a day.¹² In the first period of incommunicado detention, which could last up to six months, the prisoner had no pen, pencil, paper, newspapers, books or watch.¹ Next to the toilets was the punishment cell, No. 14, where the prisoner stayed in the dark, without a straw mattress and often on bread and water.¹ The Aljube political prison closed in the summer of 1965.²

On 26 July the strike movement begins that, in Lisbon, Almada, Barreiro, Seixal, Amora and other parts of the country, would involve some 50,000 workers, according to the PCP, which organised it.¹ They demanded higher wages, more basic foodstuffs and “Peace, bread, freedom and work” (Paz, pão, liberdade e trabalho).¹ The Government threatened to dismiss anyone who did not return to work; there were violent clashes with the police, factories shut down and many arrests.¹

At the Vila Arriaga, a small mansion on Rua do Pinheiro, in Monte Estoril, the PCP holds its Third Congress, the first underground.¹ It elects to the Central Committee, among others, Álvaro Cunhal, José Gregório, Manuel Guedes, Pires Jorge, Sérgio Vilarigues, Alfredo Dinis and Dias Lourenço, and proposes a common front of the various democratic sectors against the regime — the “frontist line of anti-fascist unity”, within which the MUNAF would be born in December.¹² The house was occupied by 17 clandestine full-time party workers who, when summoned, did not know what they were going to; security was stepped up and an escape route was planned in case the political police raided it.¹

In December 1943 the Movement of National Anti-Fascist Unity (MUNAF) is founded, presided over by General Norton de Matos.¹ With the war turning in the Allies’ favour, hunger, shortages and the strikes, the opposition was staking on a front of anti-fascist unity; the PCP had approved the “frontist line” at its congress.¹ The MUNAF brought together the Portuguese Republican Party, the Socialist Party (SPIO), the Socialist Union and the PCP, and with them republicans, socialists, communists, Catholics, liberals, monarchists, “seareiros” (the Seara Nova group), freemasons, anarcho-syndicalists and independents.¹

On a visit to the House of the Students of Angola, the Minister of the Colonies, Francisco Vieira Machado, formalises the merger of the colonies’ student “houses” into one, the House of the Students of the Empire.² The regime feared the “houses” would become a seedbed of nationalisms and placed the new House under the supervision of the Ministry of the Colonies and the patronage of the Portuguese Youth, to cultivate “imperial unity”; the following year the Coimbra branch opened.³¹ The House soon became a centre of political education and of anti-fascist and anti-colonial agitation, and many of its members joined the MUD Juvenil (Youth Movement of Democratic Unity) as early as 1946.³¹

In 1945, several women sign the lists of the Movement of Democratic Unity: the doctor Cesina Bermudes argues for a Women’s Committee to be formed within it, and Isabel Aboim Inglez becomes the first woman on the Central Committee and joins the Women’s Committee.¹⁴³ That year, the Diário de Lisboa publishes “As mulheres e o movimento de oposição” (Women and the opposition movement), a document signed by Beatriz Cal Brandão, Maria Lamas, Clementina Carneiro de Moura, Cesina Bermudes, Maria Alda Nogueira, Natália Correia, Francine Benoît and Maria Estanco Louro.¹ Maria Lamas would say that signing the lists for the founding of the MUD was her first political act: “In doing so, I came out of anonymity”.⁵² Manuela Porto also joined the MUD and, in Porto, Virgínia Moura joined the District Committee at the end of the year.¹

In July 1945, Maria Lamas becomes president of the board of the National Council of Portuguese Women, then based on Praça dos Restauradores.¹⁴ She relaunches the Council nationally, bringing in women and young people from various social backgrounds, and branches are formed around the country.³⁴ That year Maria Alda Nogueira joins the Council.² Under Maria Lamas’s presidency, the Council forms the Organising Committee of the Portuguese Abolitionist Movement (COMAP), to fight prostitution and the system that regulated it.⁵

After the Allied victory, the opposition organises legally in the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), heir to the MUNAF, set up at a meeting at the Almirante Reis Republican School Centre, in Lisbon.⁴¹² Bringing together figures from across the spectrum, it was the most important and broadest legal organisation of anti-fascist unity.² Present at the meeting, among others, were Maria Palmira Tito de Morais and Isabel Aboim Inglez, who would be the first woman on the movement’s Central Committee.¹³ Persecution began as early as 1946 and ended with the banning of the MUD.²

With the Allied victory, Decree-Law No. 35 044 of 20 October 1945 abolishes the Special Military Court, heir to the courts of 1932, and hands the trial of crimes against State security — and also of press offences — to the plenary of the criminal courts of Lisbon and Porto.¹² Each plenary was presided over by an appeal court judge appointed by the Minister of Justice, with the two most senior criminal court judges as its other members: a change that the 50 Years Commemorative Commission describes as a “mere cosmetic manoeuvre”.¹³ The Lisbon Plenary sat at the Boa-Hora court, where, among many others, Mário Soares and Álvaro Cunhal were tried.⁴ The judges let PIDE agents fill the courtroom and prevented the defendants from denouncing the conditions in which the cases had been prepared.²

Decree-Law No. 35 046 of 22 October 1945 creates the International and State Defence Police (PIDE), a “criminal investigation police body answerable to the Ministry of the Interior”, and revokes the 1933 law that had created the PVDE.¹² Under this name, the political police lasted until it was turned into the Directorate-General of Security.³ At the headquarters on Rua António Maria Cardoso, the investigation services occupied the third floor, where prisoners were interrogated and subjected to great violence and various forms of torture.⁴ In a room on that floor, in 1949, the political prisoner António Almeida, from Marinha Grande, died after being violently beaten and tortured.⁴

Decree-Law No. 35 426, on electoral registration for the elections of the President of the Republic and the National Assembly, lets women vote who are of age or emancipated and have educational qualifications, as well as “heads of household” — widows, divorcees, separated women or single women “of recognised moral probity” — who paid at least 100 escudos in taxes.¹ It expressly excludes “the married woman who is not judicially separated as to persons and property, and whose husband has electoral capacity”.¹ The National Council of Portuguese Women protested against the decree for taking the vote away from married women.² In 1946, Law No. 2015 extended the vote to some married women.¹

Law No. 2015 gives the vote to married women who can read and write and whose property tax, their own or the couple’s, exceeds 200 escudos.¹ It arose from a request by the deputy Pinto Coelho for the National Assembly to review the December decree-law, which had left married women without the vote; the committees rejected the opinion of the Corporative Chamber, which wanted to deny them the vote to “avoid disunity in the family”.¹ The deputy Maria Luísa van Zeller supported the extension, but without wanting “absolute equality” with men for women, which would go against, she said, “the spirit of the policy of women’s return to the home”.¹

At the José Estêvão Republican Centre the MUD Juvenil (Youth Movement of Democratic Unity) is formally constituted, born in April out of the Academic Movement of Democratic Unity (MAUD) and linked to the MUD, created in October 1945.¹ According to Octávio Pato, who was there, the meeting took place in Lumiar, and the Central Committee was formed at it: Salgado Zenha, João Sá da Costa, José Borrego, Júlio Pomar, Maria Fernanda Silva, Mário Sacramento, Mário Soares, Nuno Fidelino Figueiredo, Octávio Pato himself, Rui Grácio and Óscar dos Reis.² In the following years, the MUD Juvenil drives student strikes and protests, organises Youth Week and the Bela Mandil rally and supports the candidacy of Norton de Matos; many of its members went through the regime’s prisons, notably the Aljube.¹ Many members of the House of the Students of the Empire joined as early as 1946.³

Isabel Aboim Inglez, a leader of the National Council of Portuguese Women and of the Portuguese Women’s Association for Peace and the first woman on the Central Committee of the MUD, is arrested by the PIDE for the first time, accused of being “a communist element”, and released on bail the next day.¹² The year before she had been dismissed from the Faculty of Letters for political reasons.² She would be arrested again in January 1948, for distributing 1,500 copies of MUD propaganda, and would be held for two months; in February 1949 the school she ran, the Colégio Fernão de Magalhães, was closed down.¹

The National Council of Portuguese Women, presided over by Maria Lamas, shows at the National Society of Fine Arts some three thousand books by four hundred women authors from thirty countries, with photographs of women who had stood out as intellectuals and as resisters against Nazism and fascism.¹³ Manuela Porto gives a talk on “Virginia Woolf: o problema das mulheres das letras” (Virginia Woolf: the problem of women of letters).³ Newspapers linked to the regime, such as A Defesa and Novidades, accuse the Council of being against the Estado Novo (“New State”) and of linking feminism with communism.⁴ The exhibition hastened the end of the Council, closed by the police in June.²⁴

From 21 to 28 March, the MUD Juvenil (Youth Movement of Democratic Unity) holds Youth Week around the country: festivals, cultural and sporting events, outings and camps where young people’s problems and ways of resisting the dictatorship were discussed.¹ At Bela Mandil, in the municipality of Olhão, the Youth Festival brought hundreds of young people together in a camp; although legal, it was surrounded by armed PIDE, PSP and GNR forces, who forced the activities to be suspended and the site to be abandoned.¹ Many young people resisted and ended up beaten or arrested, and in protest the national anthem rang out through the woods; 28 March became National Youth Day.¹

The police close “without prior notice” the headquarters of the National Council of Portuguese Women, on Travessa da Fábrica das Sedas, in Amoreiras, where it had moved in 1946, putting an end to 33 years of the association.¹ It was the Exhibition of Books Written by Women, in January, that hastened the closure: newspapers linked to the regime had accused the Council of being against the Estado Novo (“New State”) and of linking feminism with communism.²¹ After the exhibition, its president, Maria Lamas, had been forced to choose between editing Modas e Bordados, at O Século, and the Council, and she had chosen the Council.⁴ The leaders also included Manuela Porto, vice-president since 1946, Elina Guimarães, who chaired the Legal Committee, and Isabel Aboim Inglez.⁴⁶⁸

An actress in the company of Amélia Rey Colaço and Robles Monteiro, lead in José Régio’s Benilde and Adela in The House of Bernarda Alba, Maria Barroso is no longer allowed to work at the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, by an order “that came from the police and the Ministry of Education”; the decision comes at the time of the third arrest of Mário Soares.¹² She gave recitals with the opposition poets, and the political police had already called her in for questioning.³ “It was heartbreaking. I felt it was an injustice”, she told her biographer Leonor Xavier.¹

On 1 March 1948, the MUD responds to the notification, served at the PIDE, of an order of April 1947 that deemed it illegal because “the so-called Communist Party” collaborated in it.¹ In the petition it sent to the Government, signed by António Sérgio, Isabel Aboim Inglez, Manuel Mendes, Gustavo Soromenho and others, it demanded the release of its imprisoned members, among them Tito de Morais, held in the Aljube.¹ The banning brought to a close the persecution begun in 1946, which had led to the arrest of several members and the dismissal of figures such as Bento de Jesus Caraça, but it did not prevent support for the candidacy of Norton de Matos in 1949.¹

After the closure of the National Council of Portuguese Women, over which she presided, Maria Lamas travels the country for two years, goes to Madeira and the Azores, and publishes As Mulheres do Meu País (The Women of My Country), a major piece of reportage on the life and work of Portuguese women.¹³⁶ The work came out in instalments, from May 1948 to April 1950, to get round the censorship.¹³ She organised it into five large groups — the peasant woman, the woman of the sea, the factory worker, the doméstica and the employee, which included the liberal professions, intellectuals and artists — and many of the photographs are hers, supplemented by images by other authors.¹

The mathematician and educator Bento de Jesus Caraça, an anti-fascist resister and PCP activist, dies in Lisbon on 25 June of heart disease.¹ Arrested by the PIDE in 1946, he had been dismissed as full professor at the Higher Institute of Economic and Financial Sciences, one of the cases of the persecution that fell upon the MUD.¹² The funeral, on 27 June, is a symbolic moment of protest against the regime.¹

In the presidential campaign of Norton de Matos, Maria Lamas speaks on behalf of democratic women at a support meeting organised by the campaign’s Women’s Committee.¹ She denounces the electoral law, which “excludes from the suffrage the great mass of working women and domésticas, especially married women”, and asks: “Could it be that the Estado Novo is afraid of women’s enlightened consciousness?”¹ The Central Committee of the National Democratic Women’s Movement, which supported the candidacy, brought together Maria Lamas, Cesina Bermudes, Isabel Aboim Inglez, Ema Quintas Alves and Manuela Porto.³⁴ In a speech in Santarém, Cesina Bermudes set out the demands of a “Feminist Committee”, as the CIG calls it: “abolition of the regulation of prostitution, equal pay for equal work, legal equality for both sexes […] and universal suffrage”.²

Rally for the presidential candidacy of Norton de Matos at the headquarters of A Voz do Operário, in Lisbon.¹ A photograph from Manuel Mendes’s collection shows Isabel Aboim Inglez, Norton de Matos, Carvalhão Duarte, Câmara Reys and Mário de Azevedo Gomes, among others.¹² Because of the role she had been playing in the opposition, Isabel Aboim Inglez saw the school she ran, the Colégio Fernão de Magalhães, closed down in February.²³

Present at a rally for the candidacy of Norton de Matos at the Voz do Operário, in Lisbon, are Maria Lamas, Manuel João da Palma Carlos and the doctor Cesina Bermudes, among others.¹²³ Maria Lamas and Cesina Bermudes were on the Central Committee of the National Democratic Women’s Movement, which supported the candidacy; Cesina was one of the leaders of the Women’s Electoral Committee in Lisbon and spoke at several rallies.⁴

In July 1948, General Norton de Matos put himself forward as a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, a candidacy that brought together republicans, freemasons, socialists, liberals, communists, anarcho-syndicalists, Catholics and even some monarchists.¹ The campaign, launched in January under surveillance and censorship, drew strong support in Beja, Évora and above all Porto, and women such as Maria Lamas and Cesina Bermudes were at the Lisbon rallies.¹ On 7 February, a delegates’ assembly at the António José de Almeida Republican Centre, attended by Cesina Bermudes, decided that the candidate would not go to the polls. Norton de Matos withdrew because he had no guarantee of a fair election, and Óscar Carmona was re-elected unopposed on 13 February.²¹

Arrested on 15 February on his way to the Boa-Hora Court, where the central committee of the MUD Juvenil (Youth Movement of Democratic Unity) was to be tried, Mário Soares marries Maria Barroso by proxy a week later, in the Aljube prison. One of the witnesses, Manuel Mendes, was also in prison.¹²

At 05:00, six PIDE agents and several armed GNR men raid a clandestine house at Casal de Santo António, in Luso, and arrest three full-time PCP workers: Álvaro Cunhal, Militão Ribeiro and Sofia Ferreira.¹ Sofia Ferreira, “Elvira”, and Cunhal, “Manuel”, had rented the house in November 1948 posing as a couple; Militão had joined them months later, on the run from the PIDE.¹ In May Militão was transferred to Lisbon Penitentiary, where he died in January 1950, on hunger strike; Cunhal remained in prison for eleven years, until he escaped from Peniche.²¹ Sofia Ferreira was held for three years, was arrested again in 1959 and spent, in all, more than thirteen years in the regime’s prisons.¹³

The doctor Cesina Bermudes, who had stood alongside Maria Lamas and Isabel Aboim Inglez in the campaign of Norton de Matos, is arrested for belonging to the Central Committee of the National Democratic Women’s Movement and taken to the fort of Caxias.¹² Released three months later, on 14 January 1950, she was barred from teaching at the Lisbon Faculty of Medicine and went on to teach Childcare in industrial schools.¹²

Maria Lamas, of the Central Committee of the National Democratic Movement — who in October had signed, with Ruy Luís Gomes, Virgínia Moura, José Morgado and others, a communiqué on the elections for deputies — is arrested with other members of the movement and taken to Caxias.⁴¹ According to the MDM, Virgínia Moura and Ruy Luís Gomes, among others, were imprisoned with her.⁵ They were released on bail on 24 December.¹ It was the first of several arrests of Maria Lamas, who was always held at Caxias: she would be arrested again on 18 July 1950 and in December 1953, at the airport.²³⁵

Ill, in strict isolation and on hunger strike in protest against the prison regime, the communist leader Militão Ribeiro dies in the Lisbon Penitentiary, aged 53.¹² In letters written two months earlier he had accused the PIDE of “poisoning”.¹

Thirteen months after their arrest together in Luso, Álvaro Cunhal and Sofia Ferreira are tried by the Plenary Court, at the Boa-Hora; the third prisoner, Militão Ribeiro, had died in January.¹ Cunhal, who had been held incommunicado since his arrest and had prepared his defence in that isolation, calls it “a new form of torture” on 2 May and ends up accusing: “then let the fascists sit in the dock”.²¹ On 9 May, Sofia Ferreira is sentenced to three years in prison.³ Cunhal remains in prison for eleven consecutive years, eight of them in isolation, in the Lisbon Penitentiary and then in Peniche.²⁴

Maria Lamas signs, with José Morgado, Albertina Macedo and Areosa Feio, a petition to Salazar, President of the Council (head of government), about the ill-treatment of political prisoners: it recalls the deaths of Militão Bessa Ribeiro, José Moreira and Wenceslau Ramos and the madness into which José Augusto da Silva Martins had been driven.¹ A month later, on 18 July, she is arrested for the second time.²³

The writer and activist Maria Lamas is detained for the second time and is only released six months later, after a court judgment; in prison she writes her Cartas Políticas (Political Letters), which she intended to publish under the title Cartas Humanas (Human Letters).¹ She was arrested by the PIDE three times between 1949 and 1962, and always taken to Caxias.¹²

African students linked to the House of the Students of the Empire — Amílcar Cabral, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Francisco José Tenreiro, Agostinho Neto, among others — began to meet at the Espírito Santo family home, at Rua Actor Vale, 37, where Alda do Espírito Santo lived: it was there that the Centre for African Studies was set up.¹⁴ They studied Africa and colonialism, in a closed structure because of the PIDE.²³ Noémia de Sousa was one of the “elders” of the group, which broke up when the elders, fearing the PIDE, dispersed.¹

By order of the Minister of the Interior, the Portuguese Women’s Association for Peace is dissolved, five years after the regime closed the National Council of Portuguese Women.¹² Maria Lamas had agreed to preside over it in 1938; in the view of the historian Virgínia Baptista, the association remained active despite being abolished.²

In São Tomé, the protests of the “forros” (free-born Creole islanders) against the imposition of forced labour on the plantations are put down by the governor, Carlos Gorgulho, with raids, torture, killings and deportations, which cause the deaths of hundreds of São Toméans.¹ The opposition lawyer Manuel João da Palma Carlos denounced the case and defended the prisoners.¹

Six years after the regime abolished the National Council of Portuguese Women, and despite the ban, a few dozen women meet in Lisbon to discuss the struggle for peace and the amnesty, reports Avante! (Forward!); the communiqué of the Women’s International Democratic Federation for the International Congress of Women is read out.¹

Returning from a meeting of the World Peace Council, Maria Lamas is arrested by the PIDE at the airport, and with her some fifty people who were waiting for her, among them the painter Maria Keil, Sofia Dias Coelho, Antónia Lapa and Maria Machado.¹ She was coming back from three months of travel to peace congresses; when the plane landed, a PIDE agent was waiting for her with a new arrest warrant.² Taken to Caxias, she is released on 8 January 1954.⁴

The Tarrafal concentration camp, in Cape Verde, opened in 1936, closes for the first time.¹² Between 340 and 375 prisoners passed through it — republicans, socialists, anarchists, communists, fighters from the Spanish Civil War — and 32 to 34 died there; Francisco Miguel was the last to leave in this phase.¹² The camp would reopen in 1961, for prisoners from the liberation movements.¹

A rural wage labourer, Catarina Eufémia is shot dead by Lieutenant Carrajola, of the GNR, during a strike by Alentejo workers for better wages.¹ Margarida Tengarrinha made an engraving of her death that year, and José Afonso immortalised her in “Cantar Alentejano” (Alentejo Song).¹

A PCP leader held in Peniche Fortress since 1953, António Dias Lourenço uses a knife to cut through the door of the “Segredo” (solitary), the punishment cell by the ramparts, climbs down a rope made of blankets, lets himself drop into the sea and swims ashore.¹ Workers from a fish van hide him and take him to Bombarral.¹

After meetings at the Casa do Alentejo from May 1954 onwards, called by Aquilino Ribeiro and Ferreira de Castro, the statutes of the Portuguese Society of Writers (SPE) were finally approved by ministerial order.¹ In the elections held the following day, Aquilino Ribeiro became head of the board.¹ First based on Rua das Taipas, the SPE later settled its headquarters on Rua da Escola Politécnica, where it operated until it was dissolved in 1965.¹

The chemical engineer Aida Magro, underground since 1945 and in charge of the Eastern Zone of the PCP’s Lisbon Local Committee, is arrested and given a custodial sentence of two and a half years, with security measures.¹ She spends six years in Caxias, where she is one of the authors of the thirteen letters of the Caxias Manifesto.¹²

Between 1957 and 1962, nearly thirty dissident poets and painters — Herberto Helder, Mário Cesariny, Luiz Pacheco, António José Forte, Natália Correia, among others — met at the Café Gelo, on the Rossio.²¹ On May Day 1962, the police burst into the café and beat whoever was there; days later, the manager, summoned to the police station, told them they could no longer stay.²

The First Republican Congress is held in Aveiro, driven by Mário Sacramento, and prepares the opposition for the following year’s presidential election; the Second Congress would not meet until 1969.¹

Meeting in Paris, nationalists from the Portuguese colonies who were studying in Europe, linked above all to the House of the Students of the Empire — such as Mário de Andrade, Marcelino dos Santos, Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto and Lúcio Lara — found the Anti-Colonialist Movement (MAC).¹ Its manifesto was, for Cabral, “the preface to our struggle”.¹

At the press conference at the Café Chave d'Ouro, in Lisbon, General Humberto Delgado, the opposition candidate for the Presidency, gives this answer to the France Presse correspondent, who asks him what he will do with Salazar if he is elected.¹²³ The phrase sets the country alight.⁵⁴

After a crowd welcomed him in Porto on 14 May — photographs of the rally were banned from the newspapers — Humberto Delgado returns to Lisbon.⁵ People wait for him all the way from Santa Apolónia to the Terreiro do Paço; the PIDE diverts the general’s motorcade towards the eastern part of the city and the GNR charges his supporters in the Terreiro do Paço, the Rossio, the Restauradores and the streets of the Baixa.¹⁴ In 2008, a plaque was placed in the station to commemorate the general’s arrival.³²

Humberto Delgado spoke at a rally in the gymnasium of the Liceu de Camões; the text of the speech is kept among Manuel Mendes’s papers.¹ After this rally, the police charges of his arrival at Santa Apolónia were repeated.²

June 1958 is marked by the “great Couço strike”, in a place hard hit by repression, which saw more than 200 arrests between 1933 and 25 April.¹ The Women of Couço, such as Maria Carmina and Rosa Viseu, were there in the squares where day labourers were hired, in the struggles for the eight-hour day and at the side of the prisoners.¹

The candidacy of Humberto Delgado, backed by the whole opposition after Arlindo Vicente withdrew, shakes the regime.²⁵ Through intimidation, a ban on poll monitoring and falsified results, the regime proclaimed the election of Américo Tomás.²¹ Delgado officially obtained 23% of the vote, a result never published in the Diário do Governo (Government Gazette); soon afterwards, the regime abolished the direct election of the President of the Republic.³ Strikes and arrests followed: one of those arrested, the worker Raul Alves, would die at the PIDE headquarters.⁴

Arrested on 16 July, after the strikes at the Companhia Industrial Portuguesa against the June electoral fraud, the worker Raul Alves is held in Caxias and in the Aljube; on the 31st, after being tortured, he falls from a third-floor window of the PIDE headquarters — “thrown”, writes Memória Comum — and several people are said to have seen the fall.³¹ The PIDE speaks of suicide.³ The Brazilian ambassador’s wife, who saw the fall, tells Cardinal Cerejeira, who writes to the Minister of the Interior; the reply comes back from the ministry: “It is merely an unimportant communist”.¹³ On the same floor, António Almeida had died in 1949, and José Moreira in 1950.²⁴

An administrative clerk at the São José Hospital since 1949, the guitarist Carlos Paredes is arrested at his workplace, accused of belonging to the PCP.¹ He spends a month in the Aljube and goes on to Caxias: 15 months in prison before his trial by the Plenary Court, in 1959, which is followed by his dismissal from the civil service.¹

Sentenced to 19 years in prison and hospitalised under PIDE guard, the regime opponent Henrique Galvão escapes from the Santa Maria Hospital in the early hours; days later he takes refuge in the Argentine Embassy, from where he leaves for exile in May.¹ Two years later he would lead the seizure of the liner Santa Maria.¹

A civilian and military coup of mainly Catholic inspiration, prepared after the 1958 electoral fraud by a junta that included Majors Luís Cesariny Calafate and Pastor Fernandes.¹³ On the night of 11 March, the leaders of the civilian groups gathered in the cloisters of Lisbon Cathedral; at 23:00, Pastor Fernandes ordered them to disperse — the Government knew everything.³ The PIDE arrested 44 people, the first of them Manuel Serra, the “civilian soul” of the conspiracy; some, like the young Jaime Conde, ended up in the Aljube prison, right next door.³²

Sailors and dockers of the port of Pidjiguiti, in Bissau, on strike for better wages, are violently repressed by the colonial authorities: about 50 dead and some hundred wounded.¹ The massacre was decisive for the organisation of Amílcar Cabral’s PAIGC, which in 1963 would turn to armed struggle.¹²

Underground since 1949, Maria Alda Nogueira is arrested by the PIDE in a taxi on Avenida da Liberdade.³¹ Tried by the Plenary Court on 22 October 1960, with Maria Lamas and Isabel Aboim Inglez among her character witnesses, she is sentenced to eight years in prison and security measures, which she serves in Caxias.¹³ The CIG presents her as the first woman in Portugal to be sentenced to prison for political reasons.²

Portuguese and Spanish opposition figures in exile set up the Iberian Revolutionary Directorate of Liberation (DRIL) in Caracas, to overthrow the Iberian dictatorships through armed action.¹ Henrique Galvão, who had escaped from Lisbon a year earlier, signs for the Portuguese side, on behalf of Humberto Delgado.¹ The DRIL’s most spectacular action would be the seizure of the liner Santa Maria.¹

At 16:00, a car driven by the actor Rogério Paulo gives the signal and ten PCP prisoners — among them Álvaro Cunhal, Jaime Serra and Francisco Miguel — escape from Peniche Fortress, accompanied by a GNR guard.¹²³ The escape was prepared on the outside by Pires Jorge and by António Dias Lourenço, who had himself escaped from Peniche in 1954, with the help of Octávio Pato and Rui Perdigão; Margarida Tengarrinha illustrated it.¹⁵ After it, surveillance was tightened: from then on there were two guards at each post.⁴

At a meeting called by the governor of Cabo Delgado with Makonde representatives, the order to arrest them provokes protests and the authorities open fire.¹ The number of dead is uncertain: 14 according to Portuguese reports, 16 according to eyewitnesses, 150 according to FRELIMO and as many as 600 according to some of the literature.¹ It was one of the last episodes of resistance before the war in Mozambique.¹

In the Cotonang cotton fields, in Malanje, the peasants refuse to work and burn the seeds, against compulsory cultivation and forced labour.¹ The repression, with villages bombed with napalm, caused between many hundreds and ten thousand deaths; the revolt is remembered as the genesis of Angola’s liberation struggle.¹²

In collaboration with Humberto Delgado and the DRIL, Henrique Galvão — who had escaped from the Santa Maria Hospital two years earlier — seizes the liner Santa Maria in Caribbean waters, with more than 600 passengers on board, and renames it Santa Liberdade (Saint Liberty): “Operation Dulcineia” draws the world’s attention to the Portuguese dictatorship.¹²³ The hijacking ends on 2 February, in Recife, after the new president of Brazil, Jânio Quadros, guarantees Galvão asylum.²

A group of citizens from the Democratic Opposition makes public the “Programa para a Democratização da República” (Programme for the Democratisation of the Republic).¹

In the early hours of 4 February, some 200 men armed with machetes, knives and a few pistols attack the Military Detention House, the PSP Mobile Company and other prisons in Luanda to free nationalist prisoners.¹² In the days that follow, the repression in the musseques (shanty towns) leaves hundreds dead and wounded; the date marks the beginning of the armed struggle for the independence of Angola.¹

The Union of the Peoples of Angola attacks settlements and farms in northern Angola, killing white settlers and black workers.¹ Salazar sends troops — it was necessary to “go rapidly and in force” (andar rapidamente e em força), he would say in April, after surviving the Botelho Moniz coup — and a war begins that would drag on until 1974.²¹³

The Minister of Defence, General Júlio Botelho Moniz, together with other senior commanders, tried to remove Salazar by institutional means, in the face of the war that was beginning in Angola.¹ Américo Tomás refused to dismiss the head of government, the preparations were exposed and the coup failed; several military chiefs were relieved of their posts.¹ Among those implicated was the then Colonel Francisco da Costa Gomes, who was able to continue his career.¹ Salazar survives and announces that it is necessary to “go rapidly and in force” (andar rapidamente e em força) to Angola.⁴⁵

Eight days after Salazar took over the Defence portfolio and announced that it was necessary to “go rapidly and in force” (andar rapidamente e em força) to Angola,³ the first contingent sent by sea to the war in Angola embarks on the liner Niassa, at the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos quay; it reaches Luanda on 1 May. Two days earlier the first contingent had left by air.¹ From that day on, the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos quay was above all the place from which hundreds of thousands of men left for the colonial war.²

Cecília Supico Pinto, the wife of a former minister of Salazar’s, founds the National Women’s Movement, which until 1974 mobilised women in support of the regime and of the colonial war: the “war godmothers” (madrinhas de guerra) wrote to the soldiers, and the movement issued more than 300 million aerogrammes.²¹ Directly driven by the dictatorship, it was part of a strategy to bring the country to accept the war — the official counterpart to the opposition’s women’s organisations.²

With the start of the colonial war, the Tarrafal concentration camp reopens for nationalists from Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde; the first prisoners, from Angola, arrive in February 1962.¹²³ In all, 227 men passed through it, four of whom died there; the last of them would only be released on 1 May 1974.¹

At the Arrepiado field, near Tancos, Maria Arminda dos Santos, Maria de Lourdes Rodrigues, Maria da Nazaré Andrade, Maria do Céu Policarpo, Maria Ivone Reis and Maria Zulmira André make the last jump of their course and receive the green beret: they are the Air Force’s first paratrooper nurses, and the press, which puts them on the front page, calls them the “Seis Marias” (Six Marias).¹ Throughout the colonial war, the paratrooper nurses evacuated the wounded at the front and on the flights to Lisbon.¹

Palma Inácio, Maria Helena Vidal and four other members of the opposition take command of a TAP flight from Casablanca to Lisbon and drop thousands of leaflets over Lisbon, Barreiro, Setúbal, Beja and Faro against the farce of the National Assembly elections, due to be held days later; the plane lands in Tangier.¹² The operation had been devised by Henrique Galvão, who in January had led the seizure of the Santa Maria; it was the first hijacking of a plane for political reasons in Portugal.²

A demonstration against the electoral fraud, demanding “Freedom, Peace and Amnesty for political prisoners” (Liberdade, Paz e Amnistia para os presos políticos), marches from Cova da Piedade to Almada and is fired on; the cork worker Cândido Martins Capilé, aged 28, is killed.¹² José Dias Coelho drew the scene for Avante! (Forward!).¹

Eight PCP prisoners — among them Domingos Abrantes — escape from Caxias Fort in the armoured Chrysler Imperial that had been in Salazar’s service.¹² At the wheel is António Tereso, a mechanic whom the guards trusted because they took him for a “rachado” (turncoat); at the shout of “Goal!” (Golo!), the prisoners get into the car, which speeds off through the tunnel and smashes through the outer gate.¹²

Living underground with Octávio Pato, Albina Fernandes is arrested on the same day as her partner and takes her two children, aged six and two, with her to Caxias: she rested on her knees on the floor, gripping their wrists, “so that they would not take them from her”.¹² The PIDE threatens to hand them over to an institution, but she manages to have them stay with their paternal grandparents, to whom they are handed over on 10 January 1962.²³ Tried on 17 November 1962, she spends six years and seven months in prison.¹²

In 36 hours, some 40,000 Indian troops put an end to the Portuguese State of India.¹² The governor, Vassalo e Silva, disobeys Salazar’s order to fight to the death and surrenders; the Portuguese soldiers spend months in prisoner-of-war camps, abandoned to their fate by Salazar.¹

The sculptor and communist activist José Dias Coelho is ambushed by PIDE agents in Alcântara and shot dead on Rua da Creche, which now bears his name.¹⁴³ His partner, Margarida Tengarrinha, only learnt of his death on 26 December, the day of the burial, and devoted her life to keeping his memory alive.²⁴ José Afonso evoked him in “A Morte Saiu à Rua” (Death Went Out into the Street).⁴⁶

A medical student, Isabel do Carmo is the first woman to take the floor at a plenary meeting of the 1962 academic crisis, in the University Stadium.¹ The PIDE recorded that she said she was speaking “as one of the women, as any one of them” and that she suggested offering flowers to the police, “the most beautiful weapons created in Portugal”.¹

A military and civilian revolt at the barracks of the 3rd Infantry, in Beja, led by Captain João Varela Gomes, with Manuel Serra as its civilian leader.¹ Humberto Delgado and his secretary, Arajaryr Campos, had entered the country clandestinely to take part.²⁴ The revolt failed, and the soldiers involved were arrested and expelled from the Armed Forces;⁵ but it broke a thirty-year cycle in which the opposition had not taken up arms, and the trial that followed, with 86 defendants, was the largest of the Estado Novo (“New State”).¹³

Stella Piteira Santos, a former member of the Portuguese Women’s Association for Peace and of the National Council of Portuguese Women, is arrested and tortured by the PIDE.² She had helped to take Humberto Delgado to the Beja revolt, and the police were looking for her husband, Fernando Piteira Santos; she spends almost two months in Caxias, in a cell with Maria Alda Nogueira, Sofia Ferreira and Cândida Ventura.¹ She then goes into exile in Algiers, where she would be the voice of Rádio Voz da Liberdade (Voice of Freedom Radio).²¹

Called by democratic women from the North, a rally on International Women’s Day brings thousands of people together in Porto against the colonial war and repression.¹ The police, under orders from the PIDE to “act with vigour”, charge and arrest women and men.¹

Linked to the PCP, Rádio Portugal Livre (Free Portugal Radio) broadcasts for 12 years interviews with opposition figures, news of the struggle against the regime and appeals from workers, in the factories, and from women, in the neighbourhoods.¹²

On the morning of 24 March, the students gather in the Cidade Universitária, defying the ban on the Students’ Day celebrations; the police beat and arrest students, and occupy premises and canteens.¹ The struggle goes on for months: the associations of Lisbon and Coimbra declare “luto académico” (academic mourning), Coimbra shows its solidarity and the Coimbra Academic Association is closed down.³² The date is now National Students’ Day.¹

The student associations of Lisbon and Coimbra declared “luto académico” (academic mourning) — a strike from classes, a right banned by the dictatorship.¹ The open-air plenary meetings, by the faculties and in the University Stadium, became the movement’s way of taking decisions; at one of them a woman spoke for the first time, the medical student Isabel do Carmo.¹²

A student and a PCP activist since 1961, José Mário Branco, then aged 19, is arrested by the PIDE in April 1962 and held in the Aljube and in Caxias; he is only released in September.¹ The following year, so as not to go to the colonial war, he deserts and leaves for exile in France.¹²

When the Government banned Students’ Day again, having agreed to move it to 7 and 8 April, the rector, Marcelo Caetano — who had defended university autonomy before the students from the balcony of the Rectorate — feeling that his authority had been undermined, tendered his resignation; the academic mourning was resumed.¹² His term ended on 12 April 1962.³

In the early hours of 27 April, the PIDE, with the GNR, arrests five women and ten men in Couço who were preparing the struggle for the eight-hour day in the fields: Maria Custódia Chibante, Maria da Conceição Figueiredo, Maria Galveias, Maria Madalena and Olímpia Brás would become known as the Women of Couço.²¹ During the interrogations at the PIDE headquarters, on Rua António Maria Cardoso, they are tortured with beatings, sleep deprivation and the “statue” torture: Maria Custódia spends 98 hours there without talking, 75 of them without sleep, and has to be carried to Caxias.²¹³ Maria Galveias, arrested together with her school-age daughter, is interrogated for eleven days and eleven nights.¹

In the midst of the academic crisis, workers and students demonstrate in the Baixa, shouting “We are hungry!” (Temos fome!), “Freedom!” (Liberdade!) and “Down with the PIDE!” (Abaixo a PIDE!); there are clashes in the Terreiro do Paço, the Carmo, the Rossio, Martim Moniz and Alcântara, and the riot police, the GNR, the PIDE and the Portuguese Legion keep up the repression until nightfall.¹³ Near Largo do Caldas, a burst of police machine-gun fire kills the typographer Estêvão Giro, aged 25.¹⁵² In the Rossio, the police went into the Café Gelo and beat the people inside.⁶⁴

At the proposal of Eurico Figueiredo, 81 students begin a hunger strike in the canteen of the Cidade Universitária, and some 1,500 fellow students stay with them, in solidarity.¹² In the early hours of 11 May, the riot police surround the canteen and arrest them one by one, despite the mediation of professors such as Luís Lindley Cintra; some are taken to Caxias, where a group of arrested women students go on refusing food.²³

Members of the Portuguese Society of Writers (SPE) — among them Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, José Cardoso Pires, José Saramago and Aquilino Ribeiro — signed a petition in solidarity with the student associations in struggle.¹² Three years later, the Government would dissolve the SPE.¹