Dr Afonso Costa Republican School Centre — evening classes for women (Calçada de Arroios)

In the last years of the monarchy, the Dr Afonso Costa Republican School Centre operated on Calçada de Arroios, run by the republican Alves Torgo. It was also a meeting place: republican figures such as Magalhães Lima, Afonso Costa, Manuel de Arriaga, Bernardino Machado and António José de Almeida gathered there in the evenings.²

Maria Veleda, a writer and teacher, had settled in Lisbon in 1905 with her two children and her mother. She was the teacher in charge here and set up two evening courses, entirely free, to teach women to read and write.² In 1907, according to Toponímia de Lisboa, the City Council’s street-names service, it was she who presided over the Portuguese Group for Feminist Studies, which gave evening courses for illiterate women at the Afonso Costa Centre.¹ Being able to read mattered: the electoral law of 1911 would give the vote only to those who could read and write or were heads of family.⁶

The Portuguese Group for Feminist Studies had been founded in 1907 by educated women — intellectuals, doctors, writers and above all teachers — to spread the ideals of women’s emancipation, set up a library and publish studies. It was short-lived, but it published pamphlets with speeches and lectures by its leaders, and it was around it that the Republican League of Portuguese Women was born, in 1909.³ Its members included, besides Maria Veleda, Ana de Castro Osório, Carolina Beatriz Ângelo and the doctors Sofia Quintino and Adelaide Cabete.⁴