Maria Veleda

Maria Veleda is the pen name of Maria Carolina Frederico Crispim, born in Faro in 1871.¹² She contributed to dozens of newspapers and magazines and lived in hardship, as a teacher and single mother.² In Lisbon she was the teacher in charge at the Dr Afonso Costa Republican School Centre, on Calçada de Arroios, where she set up free evening classes to teach women to read and write.²¹

In 1907 she was in the Portuguese Group for Feminist Studies, and she joined Freemasonry under the symbolic name “Angústia” (Anguish).¹ She belonged to the Republican League of Portuguese Women — as a founding member, according to Toponímia de Lisboa; according to Wikipedia, she joined in 1909, without being on the organising committee — and, from August 1910, edited its organ, A Mulher e a Criança (Woman and Child), which was followed by A Madrugada (The Dawn).¹²³ Unlike Ana de Castro Osório and Carolina Beatriz Ângelo, who wanted the vote for women who were educated and who worked, she argued that the right to vote should only be accepted if it came without restrictions.⁴ In 1911, when Ana de Castro Osório left the League, she became its president.¹²

With Ana de Castro Osório, Adelaide Cabete and Carolina Beatriz Ângelo she founded the Obra Maternal (Maternal Work), to take in abandoned children; she ran it and taught there.¹² She joined the Democratic Party and founded the Women’s Association for Democratic Propaganda, which was dissolved in July 1916, when the Sacred Union was formed.¹ She published the pamphlet Emancipação Feminina (Women’s Emancipation) and the lectures collected in A Conquista (The Conquest); her memoirs came out in 1950 in the newspaper República.¹ She died in Lisbon on 8 April 1955.¹²