Maria Luísa van Zeller

She was born in Lisbon in 1906 and graduated in Medicine from the University of Lisbon in 1932. She was a junior doctor at the Lisbon Civil Hospitals, an assistant at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology and director of the Maternal Institute and of the Alfredo da Costa Maternity Hospital. A devout Catholic, she presided over the Catholic University Women’s Youth (Juventude Universitária Católica Feminina).¹

She was on the regime’s side and in its women’s organisations. In 1938 she was assistant commissioner of the Women’s Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina), whose national commissioner was Maria Guardiola, and was responsible for physical education, health and hygiene; she was also on the executive committee of the Mothers’ Work for National Education (Obra das Mães pela Educação Nacional).²¹ She was a deputy in the National Assembly for three legislatures, from 1938 to 1949, and spoke mainly about welfare, health and education.¹ According to the journal Faces de Eva (Faces of Eve), in many of her speeches she referred “to the most pressing problems of the women of her time”, sometimes presenting herself as their representative.³

In 1946, in the debate that led to Law No. 2015, she supported the vote for married women, but warned that she did not seek for women “absolute equality” with men, which would run counter to “the spirit of the policy of women’s return to the home”.⁴ In 1947 she argued that nursing should be entrusted to women: “No one knows as well as a woman how to bend delicately over pain and, at the right moment, to say the word that consoles”.⁵ From 1963 to 1971 she was deputy director-general and then director-general of Health. She died in 1983.¹