Headquarters of the Seamstresses and Stitchers’ trade association (Rua do Benformoso)

In 1915 the trade association — the union — of the Seamstresses and Stitchers had its headquarters on this street. On 11 July that year, the newspaper A Voz do Operário (The Worker’s Voice) published a letter from a “father of a seamstress” about the women workers at a factory on the Santana hill belonging to a large Chiado firm, Ramiro Leão & C.ª: they paid for the thread they sewed with, 80 to 90 centavos a week, and earned between 185 and 220 centavos a week.¹

In the next issue, on 18 July, Adelaide Abrantes, a leader of the union, replied: the boss would not treat the women workers so badly if they were organised, “for without a boss one can still produce, but it is the boss who cannot live without the producers”. And she called them to a meeting at the headquarters, here on Rua do Benformoso. “More than a hundred” are said to have come, with more complaints: at the factory, even the doors of the lavatories had been torn off.¹

On 8 August, the union — a reformist one, whose leaders formed the hard core of the Union of Socialist Women — announced that it was “in the fight, in defence of its comrades”. Three women workers at Ramiro Leão who sat on a committee campaigning for the eight-hour-day law, Miquelina Furtado, Laurinda Pinheiro and Lúcia Martins, were dismissed by the manager as “diehard revolutionaries”. The next day, before six in the morning, their colleagues gathered at the gates and the factory came to a halt. At around ten a GNR cavalry detachment arrived and, shortly afterwards, the infantry; after some four and a half hours, the peaceful protest was broken up with pushing and shoving. A committee of the strikers went to the civil governor, and the secretary who received them is said to have wondered that, “for a mere women’s matter”, there should be need of “cavalry, infantry, uniformed police”.¹

The strike was defeated, and the next day most of the women workers went back to the factory. A dozen resigned in solidarity with their three colleagues and thought of forming a cooperative. These struggles paved the way for the 1919 law that limited working hours to eight a day.¹