Cesina Bermudes

She was born in Lisbon on 20 May 1908, the daughter of the writer Félix Bermudes. She graduated from the Lisbon Faculty of Medicine in 1932, was an assistant in Anatomy and General Practice at the Lisbon Civil Hospitals and specialised in obstetrics in 1937. She obtained her doctorate in 1947, with a mark of 19 out of 20 for her dissertation.¹ She was the first Portuguese woman to earn a doctorate in obstetrics.⁴

In 1945 she signed the lists of the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD) and argued for a Women’s Committee to be formed within it.⁴ In Norton de Matos’s campaign in the 1949 presidential election she sat on the Central Committee of the National Democratic Women’s Movement, with Maria Lamas and Isabel Aboim Inglez, and spoke at several rallies.² In a speech in Santarém she set out the demands of the Feminist Committee: “abolition of the regulation of prostitution, equal pay for equal work, legal equality for both sexes […] and universal suffrage”.⁴ On 7 February 1949 she attended the delegates’ assembly, at the António José de Almeida Republican Centre, which decided that the candidate would not go to the polls.² A photograph of 10 February shows her at the Lisbon rally at the Voz do Operário, with Maria Lamas and Manuel João da Palma Carlos.³

On 14 October 1949 she was arrested for being on the movement’s Central Committee and taken to Caxias Fort, which she left on 14 January 1950.¹² Her opposition to the regime cost her her university career: she was not allowed to take up her tenured teaching post⁴ and, barred from teaching at the Faculty of Medicine, she began teaching childcare at industrial schools.¹

In 1954 she went to Paris to study new childbirth techniques. On her return she promoted in medical journals the psychoprophylactic method, the so-called “painless childbirth”, which she pioneered in Portugal with the obstetrician Pedro Monjardino.¹ In 1989 she was made a Commander of the Order of Liberty, and she died in Lisbon in December 2001.² Since an edict of 24 September 2009, a street in the Pólo Tecnológico de Lisboa, in Carnide, has borne her name.¹