Carolina’s vote

Carolina Beatriz Ângelo came from Guarda to study in Lisbon, graduated in medicine in 1902 and devoted herself to gynaecology. An advertisement from 1909 places her consulting rooms here, at No. 84 Rua Nova do Almada.³

The Baixa was also the territory of another feminist doctor: Adelaide Cabete had consulting rooms on Rua da Prata and Rua Áurea before moving to Restauradores, where we go next.⁴

On the first floor of No. 13 in this square, in Adelaide Cabete’s consulting rooms, the National Council of Portuguese Women was born in 1914 — for the historian Rosa de Lurdes Correia, “the most important and longest-lasting Portuguese feminist association of the first half of the twentieth century”. It had its headquarters here for 32 years.⁵

Adelaide Cabete gave free consultations to poor women.⁴ The Council lived through the Republic and the dictatorship: it was presided over by Maria Lamas from 1945 and closed by the police in 1947.⁵

Carolina Beatriz Ângelo was a pioneer in surgery and, according to Lisbon’s street-naming office (Toponímia de Lisboa), the first Portuguese woman doctor to operate in this hospital.³ It was a small generation: in 1906 she, Adelaide Cabete, Domitila de Carvalho, Emília Patacho and Maria do Carmo Lopes joined a women’s movement for peace and disarmament together.³

The Republican League of Portuguese Women was launched in 1908 by Ana de Castro Osório and António José de Almeida, and was formally constituted in February 1909 — according to the street-naming office, on the second floor of No. 6 on this street. It aimed “to guide, educate and instruct Portuguese women in democratic principles” and to change the laws that concerned them.⁶⁷

After 5 October, the League handed the Provisional Government a long list of feminist demands; among them was the vote, asked for “for now” only for women who were traders, industrialists, civil servants, graduates, writers or managers of a fortune.¹¹ In 1911 it split over which vote to ask for: Ana de Castro Osório wanted it for educated women; Maria Veleda, for all women.¹

In 1907 the Portuguese Group of Feminist Studies — women doctors, writers and above all teachers — gave night classes to women who could not read at the Dr Afonso Costa Republican School Centre, here on Calçada de Arroios.⁸ Teaching women to read also opened the door to the vote: the 1911 law would only give it to those who could read and write, or were heads of household.¹

Turned down by the electoral registration committee, Carolina went to court, and the judge João Baptista de Castro — father of Ana de Castro Osório — ordered her to be registered: by saying “portugueses” (the Portuguese), the law covered both men and women. She became voter No. 2513.²

On the day of the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the polling station for São Jorge de Arroios was here, in the Clube Estefânia, then frequented only by men.¹⁰ A voter protested; Carolina pointed out that the law barred only “the insane or the drunk” from voting. At the second call, on hearing her name, she stepped forward — “That’s me!” — and handed in her ballot paper, to applause.⁹ The magazine Ilustração Portuguesa called her “the only Portuguese woman voter”.² She died four months later, aged 33.¹²