Palácio de São Bento

A former Benedictine monastery, the palace has been the seat of parliament since 1834.¹ Under the First Republic, the Chamber of Deputies met in the Session Hall — where the Constituent Assembly approved the Constitution of 1911 — and the Senate in the former hall of the Chamber of Peers, which became known as the Senate Hall.²²²³

In 1911, the Constituent Assembly of the new Republic barely discussed votes for women. On 24 July a petition from the Feminist Propaganda Association asking for it was submitted; two days later, the article on women’s civil and political rights was removed from the draft, and Bernardino Machado declared that the matter “is not constitutional”. In 1912, in the Senate, a senator argued that “a woman who is really ugly in the face is ugly in intelligence”. The electoral law of 1913 gave the vote only to citizens “of the male sex” — closing the door that Carolina Beatriz Ângelo had opened.²

The first women deputies arrived in 1935, by then under the Estado Novo (“New State”), elected on the lists of the single party: Domitila de Carvalho, Maria Cândida Parreira and Maria Guardiola. On 10 January 1935, at the first meeting of the National Assembly, the three of them took their seats in the Session Hall.²² They sat mainly on the committees for labour, welfare and education, matters “more closely linked to women’s interests”.³

In the elections of 25 April 1975, the first free ones, twenty women were elected to the Constituent Assembly, out of a total of 250 deputies; with resignations and replacements, twenty-seven came to hold a seat, among them Maria Alda Nogueira, Helena Roseta and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. Only six sat on committees, and only one chaired one: Sophia, the committee drafting the preamble. The men were addressed as “Sr. Deputado” (Mr Deputy); the women, often, as “minha senhora” (madam).⁴

On 12 November 1975, a demonstration by construction workers surrounded the palace and kept the deputies inside for about 36 hours.⁵ On the 13th, at around midday, the deputies of the PCP and the MDP/CDE, the only ones the demonstrators would let through, began to leave; the others stayed, and the siege only ended with the agreement between the unions and the prime minister, in the early hours of the 14th.²⁴²¹ The Constitution was approved on 2 April 1976. Article 13 prohibits privileging or disadvantaging anyone on grounds of sex; Article 36 gives spouses equal rights and duties.⁶

Maria Alda Nogueira, who had served almost ten years as a political prisoner, later chaired the Parliamentary Committee on the Status of Women; her bust stands in the palace cloister.⁷