Word: velho
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...three women on trial for writing an outspoken feminist tract. The authors, known as "the three Marias," had been arrested by the old regime and accused of "outraging public morals" and "abusing the freedom of the press" (TIME, July 23). In clearing them, Judge Artur Lopes Cardoso urged Maria Velho da Costa, Maria Isabel Barreno and Maria Teresa Horta to continue writing "works of art." And last week, for the first time, Portuguese movie theaters were showing The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin's 1940 spoof on Nazism, and the 1925 Soviet silent-film classic Potemkin...
...writer-defendants, all in their 30s and all mothers of small children, are Maria Velho da Costa and Maria Isabel Barreno, both published novelists who do research for Portugal's Ministry of Economics, and Maria Teresa Horta, a well-known poet who edits the literary supplement of a Lisbon newspaper. The book they put together from their writings-they collaborated through an exchange of views in letters and at weekly lunches and dinners-is no mere feminist tract but a work of literary merit. It is now being translated into several languages and will be published...
...Letters, it is all women. The social institution that shackles them worst is the role of mother. Society idealizes the role, of course, but the idealization masks the slavery of it." The new book is broader than this, however. "It has many themes," asserts the highly intellectual Velho da Costa. "Passion, oppression and especially love." But the more emotional Horta insists that "the book has one great theme, and that is the liberation of women...
...Velho da Costa, by contrast, is more charitable toward males: "Society and social oppression are not made by men alone, but by historical structures and thought patterns that oppress all of us." Moreover, she sees dangers in uncompromising militancy. "I value the feminist movement, as I value all activist movements that contribute to the struggle for human freedom," she says. "But in their fury and their aggressiveness and their mono-mindedness, women in the movement are proving just as 'phallic' as men, and that is what they should want to avoid. If we fight fire with fire...
Whether militant like Horta or moderate like Velho da Costa, active Women's Liberationists have been virtually unheard of in Portugal, where old ideas about "a woman's place" are so deeply ingrained that few women are even conscious of them. Yet when New Portuguese Letters came out in April 1972, one-third of the original printing of 3,000 copies was sold within a month. Then the regime of Premier Marcello Caetano cracked down. Officials invoked a new law that makes writers criminally responsible for their work if the censors, who render judgments only after publication, voice...