Madalena Barbosa

She was one of the founders of the Women’s Liberation Movement (MLM), in May 1974.¹² The movement set out “to fight for the right to equality without discrimination on the grounds of sex”.¹ It was the MLM that called the feminist demonstration of 13 January 1975 in Parque Eduardo VII. That afternoon, surrounded and chased by a crowd of men, many of the women demonstrators took refuge in Madalena Barbosa’s flat, right next door; “we went to Madalena Barbosa’s place”, said Maria Antónia Palla, who was there.²

She advocated the right to divorce and the decriminalisation of abortion. She took part in setting up the Movement for Contraception and Free Abortion and, in 1979, was spokeswoman for the National Campaign for Abortion and Contraception. In the 1980s she helped create the first Portuguese feminist documentation centres, the Cooperativa Editorial de Mulheres (Women’s Publishing Cooperative) and Informação e Documentação sobre Mulheres (Information and Documentation on Women), whose collection is now in the care of UMAR — União de Mulheres Alternativa e Resposta (Women’s Union Alternative and Response). In the same decade she joined the staff of the Commission on the Status of Women, now the Commission for Citizenship and Gender Equality (CIG).¹

She died in 2008. The following year, Lisbon City Council and the CIG created the Madalena Barbosa Prize, and the CIG library bears her name. Her press articles and the texts of her talks were collected after her death in the book Que força é essa (What Force Is That).¹