Women, the first

We knew, in those old days, that Portugal had washerwomen, “charming little girls, who went to wash by day and fall in love at night,” a Virgin of Fátima who appeared in our houses every May 13, and the singer Amalia Rodrigues, razor-like voice that took your breath away and left no one indifferent.

Sometimes news came from Portugal, for example that a dictator named Salazar fell from his chair while the barber was shaving him and that was the end of his power, that a certain Marcelo Caetano succeeded him and with him came a certain openness, that there were presidents of the picturesque republic, clandestine parties, murdered heroes, General Humberto Delgado among others, whose names should be present, until April 25, 1974, when we learned, and How did we know, that some captains revolted and by taking tanks out into the streets, they also brought out the best in human beings.

After that military Revolution that the civilian population supported as if they had been waiting for it and Maria de Medeiros recounted in the film Captains of April, the Age of Democracy began and women, who already existed, began to be common in public life, Let’s say it, although obscurantism, norms and customs prevented us from seeing them. In the very first hour of the democratic era, Celeste Caeiro, a Lisbon native who carried carnations that were not useful in her workplace, stood out for her symbolism and her relevant humility and decided to distribute them among the soldiers because “it was the only thing that I could offer.”

The soldiers accepted carnations and placed them in their rifles: the image went around the world and settled in the imagination of dreamers and those who operate against dreams, but the creator of the unusual gesture remained anonymous. Celeste Caeiro is 86 years old, she lives with the logical difficulties of someone who has never stopped being poor, she is around five feet tall, her eyes are bright, she gave her name to a Revolution – the Carnation Revolution – and she does not believe she deserves it. of any medal or tribute, perhaps that is why it lacks general and official recognition.

Celeste Caeiro represents the concept of citizenship like few people. It too, as if it were a mirror, returns an image of lack of human and democratic sensitivity of society and institutions. Truly the poor, the poor, are invisible.

Writers, teachers, singers, composers, politicians, activists: the 45 years of democratic life have radically changed the portrait of a country that is now presented in Europe and in the world as contemporary and not as an ancestral residue. The only woman who has been head of government in the Iberian Peninsula is Portuguese: Lourdes Pintasilgo, in 1979. It is true that she was called “minister” and not minister, but since then no other woman who occupied a place in the executive branch has been treated as masculine, as continues to happen to women who preside over institutions, be it the parliament, which during one legislature – in a hundred years of history – was led by Assunção Esteves, or in private institutions.

Presidency is a man’s thing

Presidency is still a man’s thing, female presidents do not exist, although there may be, perhaps by male delegation, a woman who will be called “Madam President.” Fortunately there are female painters, a universe conquered by several women in this democratic modernity. Paula Rego is, in this context, the voice and the cry. Their deformed beings tell more than a hundred treatises on violence and suffering. She intervened with decisive works, strong and painful, in the pro-abortion campaign, which Portuguese women won.

Paula Rego lives in London. He is almost 85 years old, he continues to paint the world and his work is in the best contemporary art museums. And what can we say about Helena Viera da Silva, who lived in exile and built the most beautiful works from memory. She and the great poet Sophia de Mello Breyner stated, after the Revolution. that poetry was in the street and they made it clear on a poster that it is impossible to look at it without being moved.

It is essential to travel to Lisbon to visit the places of Sophia, go up to the Graça viewpoint and read a poem, perhaps this one, titled “April 25”: This is the dawn that I expected / The initial day whole and clean / where we emerged from the night and the silence / and free we inhabit the substance of time. And then, with that built-in pleasure, cross the city and in Amoreiras enter the Viera da Silva Foundation, see the red carnations that lightly populate the sign of “A poetry is on the street” and feel that those women organized the world and gave it beauty. Maybe right there you will hear Teresa Salgueiro sing, and with her voice like a rising moon, she will travel along the profiles of the city like Alain Tanner did in “The White City.” Teresa Salgueiro’s voice penetrates homes and souls and is a flag, they said in Mexico and then it has been repeated on several continents.

The birth of modern feminism in Portugal had three names, “Three Marys”, as they were called, perhaps with some disdain, who faced the dictatorship openly and laid the foundations so that other women could walk. They are Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa, the three of them signed a book that could well be considered a feminist manifesto: New Portuguese letters.

This magnificent work, which demanded freedom and highlighted the need for women to express themselves with their own voices, was considered immoral and pornographic by the regime. The authors were prosecuted and only after the Revolution were they acquitted of the serious crime they were accused of. : thinking without paying attention to the canons of patriarchy. Each of the authors followed their literary career, they are teachers of several generations of activists and Novas carta portuguesas is a contemporary classic that inaugurates essential modernity in Portugal.

The “Capable”

Portuguese women are not laundresses, as was harping on in Spain, they are capable people and this is claimed by a group that bears that name, “Capazes”, which includes prestigious professionals, feminists and activists, who intervene in society as they other groups do.

The equality proposals defended by feminist movements have managed to establish themselves in society naturally, and no one anymore discusses parity in institutions, marriage between people of the same sex or the right to abortion.

Surrogacy and controlled pregnancy was approved in parliament after many debates and at the proposal of the most radical left. At the front line of political activity there are women: the third party in number of votes according to the European elections, the Bloco de Esquerda, is led by women: Catarina Martins as the general secretary, young people and feminists are also the parliamentary spokespersons and the leader of the European representation. All parties have women in their leadership and both parliament and the socialist government are approaching parity. The Minister of Justice, Francisca Van Dumem, is the first black person to occupy a place in the executive.

The heirs of Agustina Bessa Luis

And there are the younger Portuguese writers, an endless and happy list of cosmopolitan storytellers and poets who write from their own identity although with different ways of looking. Dulce Maria Cardoso, Inês Pedrosa, Alexandra Lucas Coelho and Ana Margarida de Carvalho are some names of new, translated and award-winning authors, who demonstrate that the dynasty of Agustina Bessa-Luis, followed by Lídia Jorge, has successors and, therefore, literature does not end. Agustina Bessa Luis, legendary author of The Sibyljust died at 97 years old. His inaugural voice, always surprising, is increasingly sought after. She said of herself that “she was born an adult and would die a girl,” perhaps because her work is a continuous and unpostponable search. Nor does the impulse provided by María Lamas, journalist, feminist, communist activist, persecuted by the dictatorship and exiled to Paris, an author who combated the image of submissive women that the system proposed in the magazine, fall into a vacuum. Fashions and Embroidery and claimed, along with other rights, the right to women’s happiness. Or the work of Maria Antonia Pallas, also a journalist, who has recently published a volume with her chronicles about May 68, those that appeared and those that were removed by censorship. This woman, who was born in 1933, has given the book the stimulating name of Revolution, my love and he has dedicated it to his son, the current Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa. Quite a mother character.

The character that so many women have used to maintain throughout liquid times the conquests of emancipation that acquired legal force in Portugal with April 25 and the Carnation Revolution. It is called that, and that is how it remained in history, due to the determined and bold gesture of a small and very large woman named Celeste Ceiro, to whom this article is dedicated. With emotion and affection.

#Women