Republicteacherwriter and journalistpresident of the Republican League of Portuguese Women (from 1911)advocate of unrestricted votes for womenfounder of the Obra Maternal (Maternal Work)
Born
1871, Faro
Died
8 April 1955, Lisbon
A teacher and journalist from Faro, and a single mother, she gave evening classes to illiterate women and led the Republican League of Portuguese Women, advocating unrestricted votes for women.
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 was a founding member of the Republican League of Portuguese Women and, from August 1910, edited its organ, A Mulher e a Criança (Woman and Child), which was followed by A Madrugada (The Dawn).13 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
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A writer, author of what is considered the first Portuguese feminist manifesto (1905), she launched the Republican League of Portuguese Women and founded, with Carolina Beatriz Ângelo, the Feminist Propaganda Association, which advocated the vote for educated women.
A doctor, the first Portuguese woman surgeon and a suffragist. A widow and “head of household”, she won in court the right to be registered as a voter and, on 28 May 1911, at the Clube Estefânia, became the first woman to vote in Portugal.
A republican doctor who only began studying after she married, she founded the National Council of Portuguese Women in 1914, chaired it for more than twenty years and made her practice in Restauradores its headquarters.
One of the first Portuguese women doctors, she qualified in Lisbon in 1905 and was a feminist, a republican and a freethinker: she belonged to the Portuguese Group for Feminist Studies and to the Republican League of Portuguese Women.
Considered the first Portuguese professional woman journalist, she worked for “O Século” and “A Capital”, campaigned for divorce and for the vote, and opened the way for other women journalists, such as Maria Lamas.
Chosen by the captains as a prestigious leader, he was a member of the National Salvation Junta, succeeded Spínola as President in September 1974, declared a state of siege on 25 November 1975 and promulgated the 1976 Constitution.
Notes on the sources5
The day of birth: 26 November 1871 (Toponímia de Lisboa) or 26 February 1871 (Wikipedia, which gives Rua da Parreira, in Faro).
Whether she was a founding member of the Republican League of Portuguese Women (Toponímia de Lisboa) or joined in 1909 without being on the organising committee, because António José de Almeida thought her too revolutionary (Wikipedia).
Whether she chaired the Portuguese Group for Feminist Studies in 1907, as Toponímia de Lisboa says: Wikipedia calls her one of its founders, and other sources give the presidency to Ana de Castro Osório.
Until when she chaired the League: according to Wikipedia, she broke with it in 1915, when the League declared itself non-partisan.
The year of the pamphlet “Emancipação Feminina”: 1906 (Toponímia de Lisboa) or 1902 (Wikipedia).
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