Writers, teachers, singers, politicians, artists, activists: from Celeste Caeiro, the icon of the revolution, to the singer Teresa Salgueiro, Portuguese women are no longer laundresses, as the song repeated several times, they are today ‘today references.
- This article belongs to the magazine Portugal: the magic of the improbablefrom eldiario.es. Read the Portuguese version here. Become a member now and receive our quarterly magazines delivered to your home
We once knew that Portugal had washerwomen, “charming little girls who would wash during the day and fall in love at night,” a Virgin of Fátima who appeared in our homes every May 13, and the singer Amalia Rodrigues. , razor-sharp voice that takes your breath away and leaves no one indifferent.
Sometimes news came from Portugal, for example that a dictator named Salazar fell out of his chair while the barber was shaving him and that it was the end of his power, that a certain Marcelo Caetano succeeded him and with him a certain opening, 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, the date which we learned, and How did we know that certain captains revolted and that by bringing the tanks down to the streets, they also brought out the best in human beings.
After this military revolution that the civilian population supported as if they expected it and that Maria de Medeiros recounted in the film Captains of April, the era of democracy began and women, who already existed, began to be common in public life, let’s say it, even if obscurantism, norms and customs prevented us from seeing them. From the first hour of the democratic era, Celeste Caeiro, a native of Lisbon who wore carnations that were not useful in her workplace, stood out for her symbolism and pertinent humility and decided to distribute them to soldiers because ” it was the only thing I could offer.
The soldiers accepted the 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 this 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 about five feet tall, her eyes are bright, she gave her name to a Revolution – the Revolution Carnations – and she doesn’t do it. believe that she deserves a medal or a tribute, perhaps that is why she lacks general and official recognition.
Celeste Caeiro represents the concept of citizenship like few people. It too, as if it were a mirror, reflects an image of lack of human and democratic sensitivity of society and institutions. In reality, 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 which is now presented in Europe and around 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 has held the position. a place in the executive power. was treated as masculine, as continues to happen to women who preside over institutions, whether Parliament, which during a legislature – in a hundred years of history – was led by Assunção Esteves, or in private establishments.
The presidency is a man’s affair
The presidency is still a male affair, female presidents do not exist, even if there can be, perhaps by male delegation, a woman who will be called “Madam President”. Fortunately there are women 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 recount more than a hundred treatises on violence and suffering. She intervened with decisive, strong and painful works in the campaign in favor of abortion, won by the Portuguese.
Paula Rego lives in London. He is almost 85 years old, he continues to paint the world and his works can be found in the best contemporary art museums. And what 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 declared this after the Revolution. that poetry was in the street and they made it clear on a poster that it was impossible to look at it without being moved.
It is essential to go to Lisbon to visit the squares of Sophia, go up to the Graça viewpoint and read a poem, perhaps this one, entitled “April 25”: This is the dawn I have been waiting for / The first whole and clean day / when we emerged from the night and the silence / and free we inhabit the substance of time. And then, with this inherent pleasure, crossing the city and entering the Viera da Silva Foundation in Amoreiras, seeing the red carnations that lightly populate the sign “A poetry is in the street” and feeling that these women have organized the world and it gave beauty. Maybe there you will hear Teresa Salgueiro singing, and with her rising moon voice, she will travel through the profiles of the city like Alain Tanner did in “The White City”. The voice of Teresa Salgueiro penetrates homes and souls and is a flag, it was said in Mexico, then it was 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 openly confronted the dictatorship and laid the foundations for other women to walk. They are Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa, all three have signed a book which 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 voice, was considered immoral and pornographic by the regime. The perpetrators were prosecuted and it was only after the Revolution that they were acquitted of the serious crime of which they were accused. . : think without paying attention to the canons of patriarchy. Each of the authors has followed their own literary path, they are the teachers of several generations of activists and Novas carta portuguesas is a contemporary classic which inaugurates an essential modernity in Portugal.
The “capable”
Portuguese women are not laundresses, as they said in Spain, they are capable people and this is claimed by a group that bears this name, “Capazes”, which includes prestigious professionals, feminists and activists, who intervene in society like other groups. TO DO.
The equality proposals defended by feminist movements have managed to impose themselves naturally in society, and no one anymore talks about institutional parity, same-sex marriage or the right to abortion.
Surrogacy and controlled pregnancy were approved in Parliament after numerous debates and on the proposal of the most radical left. At the forefront of political activity are women: the third party in terms of number of votes according to the European elections, the Bloco de Esquerda, is led by women: Catarina Martins as 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 the Parliament and the socialist government are getting closer to parity. The Minister of Justice, Francisca Van Dumem, is the first black person to occupy a place within the executive.
The heirs of Agustina Bessa Luis
And there are the young Portuguese writers, an endless and happy list of cosmopolitan storytellers and poets who write from their own identity although with different perspectives. Dulce Maria Cardoso, Inês Pedrosa, Alexandra Lucas Coelho and Ana Margarida de Carvalho are some of the names of new authors, translated and awarded, who demonstrate that the dynasty of Agustina Bessa-Luis, followed by Lídia Jorge, has successors and, therefore, Therefore, literature does not stop. Agustina Bessa Luis, legendary author of The Sibyljust died at age 97. His inaugural voice, always surprising, is increasingly sought after. She says of herself that “she was born an adult and would die a girl”, perhaps because her work is a continuous and unavoidable research. The impetus given by María Lamas, journalist, feminist, communist activist, persecuted by the dictatorship and exiled in Paris, author who fought the image of the submissive woman that the system proposed in the magazine, does not fall into the category either. empty. Fashions and embroidery and claimed, among other rights, the right to happiness of women. Or the work of Maria Antonia Pallas, also a journalist, who recently published a volume with her chronicles on May 68, those that appeared and those that were deleted by the censors. This woman, born in 1933, gave this book the stimulating name of Revolution, my love and he 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, thanks to the determined and daring gesture of a small and very tall woman named Celeste Ceiro, to whom this article is dedicated. With emotion and affection.
