From Rato to the Park

The Padaria do Povo (People’s Bakery) was founded in 1904 as a cooperative, to make cheaper bread for the neighbourhood. In 1919, Bento de Jesus Caraça and António Ferreira de Macedo founded the Popular University in its rooms; it ran here until 1946, when it was persecuted and closed down.⁵⁶

According to the Democratic Women’s Movement itself, it was at an assembly here, in 1968, that the movement was born, heir to the National Council of Portuguese Women and the Portuguese Women’s Association for Peace. On 21 October 1973 it held its first national meeting, with 250 women.⁷

In 1909, Carolina Beatriz Ângelo lived on the first floor of No. 181 on this street, with her husband and cousin, the republican doctor Januário Barreto.⁸ Januário died in 1910, a few months short of seeing the Republic; his wake was held here, and a crowd followed the funeral procession to the Prazeres Cemetery.⁹

Widowed, with a daughter to support, Carolina became a “head of household” — the status that the electoral law of 1911 allowed her to invoke in order to claim the vote. She voted a year later, in Arroios: the first woman to vote in Portugal.¹⁰

On 30 December 1972, at the end of the afternoon Mass, the educator Maria da Conceição Moita went to the microphone of this chapel and announced, on behalf of a group of Christians, a 48-hour vigil, with fasting, against the colonial war.³ The next day, some three hundred people approved a motion against the “criminal war” and the “complicity of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church”. Riot police surrounded the chapel and took dozens of people to the police station; fourteen ended up in Caxias.¹¹

When the police came in, it was a librarian, Maria Benedita Galamba de Oliveira, who led the prayers. Months later, arrested by the DGS, Conceição Moita was slapped until she fainted and spent seven days and eight nights without being allowed to sleep.³

In 1946 the National Council of Portuguese Women moved its headquarters from Restauradores to this lane. Under the presidency of Maria Lamas it had grown and opened branches around the country; the move was, according to the researcher Rosa de Lurdes Correia, the opportunity the regime needed.¹

On 28 June 1947 the police closed the headquarters “without prior notice”. Shortly before, Maria Lamas had been forced to choose between editing the magazine Modas e Bordados (Fashions and Embroidery) and the Council — and had chosen the Council.¹² She responded by travelling the country to write As Mulheres do Meu País (The Women of My Country), published in instalments from 1948.¹³

In the early hours of 25 April 1974, officers of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) occupied the studios of Rádio Clube Português, on this street, without incident, and made it the Movement’s broadcaster.¹⁴¹⁵ At 04:26 the announcer Joaquim Furtado read the first communiqué, which asked the population to stay calm and doctors to go to the hospitals.¹⁵

At around 14:30, the communiqué announcing the siege of Marcelo Caetano in the Carmo was read by a woman, Clarisse Guerra.¹⁵¹⁶ Throughout the day the station played songs that had been banned, by José Afonso, Adriano Correia de Oliveira, José Jorge Letria, Luís Cília and José Mário Branco.¹⁵¹⁶

Late in the afternoon, some fifteen activists from the Women’s Liberation Movement — some with their children — came to the park to burn symbols of women’s oppression: pots and pans, brooms, bridal wreaths, sexist toys, the civil and penal codes. Three of them played the bride, the housewife and the “vamp”.

The newspaper Expresso had announced the event in a mocking tone, and some two thousand men turned up, shouting “Out with them!” (fora com elas!). They surrounded some of the women and tried to overturn the van the children were in. The bonfire never happened — and the “bra burning” is a legend, denied by the participants and by the journalist Maria Antónia Palla, who stayed to the end.⁴

This building housed the Sir, the restaurant where Celeste Caeiro worked. It turned one year old on 25 April 1974, and the owners had bought carnations to give to their women customers. That morning the boss announced that the restaurant would not open, “because there’s a revolution going on”, and the carnations were handed out to the women on the staff so that they would not wilt. Celeste took a bunch and caught the metro down to the Baixa.¹⁷

The rest of the story is in the route The first day.

From 4 to 12 January 1947, the National Council of Portuguese Women held the “Exhibition of Books Written by Women” (Exposição de Livros Escritos por Mulheres) here: three thousand books by four hundred women authors from thirty countries, and photographs of women who had stood out as intellectuals and as members of the resistance to Nazism and fascism.¹⁸ The actress Manuela Porto spoke about Virginia Woolf and “the problem of women of letters”.¹²

It was “a resounding success”, Maria Lamas wrote in a letter of March 1947, and the Catholic press saw the Council, in her words, as “a mortal danger to Woman and Morality”¹⁹ — and, for the researcher Teresa Joaquim, it was this exhibition that led the regime to close it down six months later.¹³