Graça, the women’s hill

In 1915 this street was home to the trade association of the Seamstresses and Stitchers. That summer, A Voz do Operário (The Worker’s Voice) published a letter from the father of a seamstress at the factory that the Chiado firm Ramiro Leão had on the Santana hill: the women workers paid for the thread they used and earned between 185 and 220 centavos a week. Adelaide Abrantes, a leader of the association, replied: the boss would not treat them like that if they were organised, “for without a boss one can still produce, but it is the boss who cannot live without the producers”. More than a hundred women workers came to the meeting she called here.

In August, three women workers who had asked for the eight-hour day — Miquelina Furtado, Laurinda Pinheiro and Lúcia Martins — were dismissed. Their colleagues picketed the factory gate before six in the morning and brought it to a halt; after four and a half hours, GNR cavalry and infantry dispersed them. The strike was lost, but the eight-hour law came in 1919.¹

Angelina Vidal (1847–1917) spoke at rallies and wrote in workers’ newspapers for the Republic and for socialism; she was editor of A Voz do Operário and taught French and music. She championed equality between men and women at work and in civil law, although she never called herself a feminist.

A Navy doctor’s widow since 1894, she saw the monarchy refuse her a pension for being an “enemy of the institutions”. The pension was granted on 31 July 1917 — and Angelina died the next day, here, at No. 41 Rua de São Gens.² In 1924 Lisbon gave her name to a street nearby, with the caption “Illustrious Lecturer and Propagandist for Social Emancipation” (Ilustre Conferencista e Propagandista da Emancipação Social).³

In 1971 Natália Correia opened a bar here with three friends — Isabel Meyrelles, Júlia Marenha and Helena Roseta — and brought here the circle she used to host at home, with people from the arts, from letters and from the opposition.⁵ People discussed, says a walking guide from the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH), “literature, politics and feminism in freedom”.⁶

Natália, already convicted over the anthology of erotic and satirical poetry she had edited, was here on the night of 24–25 April 1974, and it was here that she celebrated the fall of the dictatorship.⁷

Founded in 1879 as the tobacco workers’ newspaper, A Voz do Operário became the largest popular school in Lisbon: in 1938 it had 4,200 pupils, most of them workers’ children.⁸

In 1949 the opposition held rallies here for Norton de Matos’s presidential candidacy — and women sat at the top table: Isabel Aboim Inglez, Maria Lamas and the doctor Cesina Bermudes, leaders of the women’s movement that supported the general.⁹ In October that year Cesina Bermudes was arrested and taken to Caxias;¹⁰ Maria Lamas would be arrested three times.¹¹

This former convent housed Lisbon’s Civil Prison for Women. It held mainly common criminals, but it also took in women political prisoners.¹² Magda Fonseca remembers visiting her aunt, a communist activist, here as a child: the “apalpadeiras” (the women who frisked visitors) at the entrance, the half-height mesh between prisoners and visitors, the uniforms — “little blue and white checks for the political ones, and red and white for the common prisoners” — and the notes hidden in the child’s underwear.¹³

It was here that the Plenary Court sent Isabel Aboim Inglez for three days, for “lack of respect for the court”. On her way out, she said she had learnt from the other women prisoners and carried out a “sociological study”.¹⁴

On 3 November 1951 Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen moved with her family to the first floor of No. 57 in this lane. “I’m in Graça! I arrived today,” she wrote to her mother. She lived here until her death in 2004. The house had two sides: one facing the river and the other facing Travessa das Mónicas, “where there was a prison”.⁴

From here came a resistance made of poems and of deeds: support for Humberto Delgado, the National Commission for Aid to Political Prisoners, the Catholic vigils against the colonial war.¹⁵ At the end of the street, the Graça viewpoint has borne her name since 2009, with a bust and a plaque bearing the poem “Lisboa”.¹⁶