Elina Guimarães

She was born in Lisbon in 1904, the daughter of Vitorino Guimarães, an Army officer, teacher and minister of the First Republic.¹ Afonso Costa called her a “woman of the future”.⁴ While still a student, she challenged in the magazine Vida Académica what Júlio Dantas had written about women; she graduated in Law in Lisbon in 1926, with a mark of 18 out of 20.¹ In 1928 she married Adelino da Palma Carlos, a fellow student since secondary school,³ who in 1974 would head the first government after 25 April.⁵

Invited by Adelaide Cabete, she joined the National Council of Portuguese Women,⁴ where she was secretary-general (1927), vice-president of the board (1928, 1929 and 1931), head of the legal and suffrage sections and editor of the magazine Alma Feminina (1929–1930).¹ A forerunner of “legal feminism”, she defined it as the current that “imposes and advocates the equality of the sexes before the law”.¹ At the Second Feminist and Education Congress, in 1928, she argued in her paper “Protecção à mulher trabalhadora” (Protection for the working woman) that women should receive part of their wages during the compulsory rest before and after childbirth, and that pregnancy should not be grounds for ending an employment contract.² She also chaired the executive committee of the national subscription opened by the newspaper O Rebate for the families of political prisoners, deportees and exiles.³

In 1931 she was among those who protested to the Minister of Public Instruction against the end of co-education in primary schools.⁴ She wrote in the press about women’s rights, as far as the censors allowed, and published O Poder Maternal (Maternal Authority, 1933) and A Lei em que Vivemos (The Law We Live Under, 1937), on the law in women’s lives.¹ In 1946 she was elected vice-president of the Council’s general assembly, and was in office when the Estado Novo closed it down, in 1947, at its Amoreiras headquarters.¹⁵

In the opposition, she joined the MUD in 1945, took part in the Aveiro Republican Congress, in 1969, and in the Congress of the Democratic Opposition, in 1973, sitting on its national committee. After 25 April she chaired the League for Women’s Civic Rights.¹ In 1985, at the close of the International Decade for Women, President Ramalho Eanes made her an Officer of the Order of Liberty.¹⁵ She died in Lisbon on 24 June 1991; in November that year, the City Council named a street in Santa Clara after her.¹