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Maria Teresa Horta, a Portuguese feminist writer who helped break the restrictions of her conservative country on women, died on February 4 at her home in Lisbon. She was 87 years old.
His death was announced on Facebook by his publisher, Dom Quixote. Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro paid tribute to him on X, calling him “an important example of freedom and the struggle to recognize the place of women”.
Ms. Horta was the latest surviving member of the famous writers known as “Three Marias”, who wrote together the 1972 book “Novas Cartas Portuguesas” (“New Portuguese Letters”). A collection of letters that women have written on their problems as women in Portugal, it opened a world of repressed female sexuality, made the country’s ham dictatorship furiously and led to their arrest and their criminal prosecution for indecency and abuse of evil freedom of the press.
“For feminists around the world, as well as for champions of a free press, police action against Portuguese women in June 1972 was an outrage which has slowly become the objective of an international protest movement”, wrote Time Magazine in July 1973.
The three Marias – Mrs. Horta, Maria Isabel Baro (1939-2016) And Maria Velho da Costa (1938-2020) – has become international feminist folk heroes, and the renown of the book alerted the world of repression under the Portuguese dictatorship. Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras and Adrienne Rich were among the writers who declared their public support. The national organization for women voted to make the case its first international feminist cause.
The case was not Mrs. Horta’s first brush with the controversy.
In 1967, she had been “beaten in the street” after the publication of her volume of revolutionary poetry, “Minha Senhora of Mim” (“My Dame of Me”), She said to her biographer Patrícia reis in 2019. This book “challenged something deeply rooted in this country,” she said: “The silence of female sexuality”.
Frequent blows at the door by the Portuguese secret police have become part of his life.
The themes of her work come from what she described as double oppression: being a woman in society dominated by the men of Portugal and growing up in a police state.
“I was born in a fascist country, a country that stole freedom, a country of cruelty, prisons, torture.” She said An Italian interviewer in 2018. “And I understood very early that I could not bear this.”
Nor would she defend the oppression of women in the traditional Macho culture of Portugal. “Women are beaten or raped as much by a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, anyone, as by a worker, a peasant and so on”, ” She said Lisbon Daily Diário de Notícias in 2017. “Women have always been beaten and have always been raped. People do not consider the violence that takes place in bed, in the sexual act with their husband. »»
In 1971, these concerns inspired Ms. Horta to start meeting each week with two friends and colleagues authors, Ms. Barreno and Mme Da Costa, to share written reflections on the common themes that disturbed them.
They were inspired by a classic XVIIth century work, “the letters of a Portuguese nun”, supposed to be written by a young woman closed in a Portuguese convent to the French cavalry officer who had abandoned her. Researchers now believe that work was fiction, but its powerful expression of desire and repressed frustration resonated with the three Marias.
Like the nun of the book, they used, as well as poems, to express their misfortune as women at the beginning of the thirties, educated by nuns, married and with children, in a lisbon stifling under a dictatorship of 35 years, rigid Catholicism and colonial wars poorly judged in Africa.
When they published the writings as “new Portuguese letters”, they swore never to reveal to foreigners, even less the police, who had written what.
“Their views and lifes were far away,” said Neal Ascherson wrote In The New York Review of Books in A Review of the 1975 English translation, entitled “The Three Marias”. “Maria Isabel the coolest, Maria Teresa The most creaky personality, Maria Fátima The one who has moved out of pure feminism towards the social and psychological analyzes of the oppression of an entire people.”
The strange hybrid – Mr. ASCHERSON called it “a huge and complicated garland” – is steeped in repressed rage in the state in which women are.
“They wanted us to sit on the salons, patiently embroidering our days with the many silences, the many sweet words and gestures that the custom dictates,” said one of the letters. “But be it here or in Beja, we refused to be cloistered, we are quietly or cheeky, which cut our habits all of a sudden.”
Another letter says: “We have also won the right to choose revenge, since revenge is part of love, and love is a good that is granted to us in practice: practicing love with our thighs, Our long legs that fully fulfill the expected exercise of them. “
Although Mr. ASCHERSON found the book “often exasperating imprecise, self-indulgent and flatulant”, he said that “where he is precise, the book always bites” and “where he is erotic, he is neither exhibitionist Nor shy but well calculated to touch the mind through emotion.
Some Portuguese criticisms welcomed him as “courageous, daring and violent”, as the Nuno author of Sampayo said it in the Lisbon Journal has capital. They predicted a difficult reception.
Prime Minister Marcello Caetano tried to put the perpetrators in prison, calling them “women who are shame in the country, who are non -patriotic”.
On May 25, 1972, the censorship of the State press prohibited the book. The next day, he was sent to the Lisbon criminal police service. When the authors’ trial opened in 1973, the crowd was so great that the judge ordered that the courtroom was authorized.
In May 1974, almost two years after their arrest and two weeks after the Portuguese dictatorship was overthrown, the three Marias were acquitted.
Judge Artur Lopes Cardoso, who had supervised the case, has become a sudden convert, declaring the book “neither pornographic nor immoral”. “On the contrary,” he said, “it is a high-level work of art, according to other works of art produced by the same authors.”
Maria Teresa de Mascarenhas Horta Barros was born in Lisbon on May 20, 1937, the daughter of Jorge Augusto da Silva Horta, an eminent doctor and a curator who supported the dictatorship, and Carlota Maria Mascarenhas. His paternal grandmother had been in sight in the movement of the Portuguese suffragist.
Maria frequented the Filipa de Lencastre High School, graduated from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Lisbon, and published her first poetry book at 23 years old. She would continue to write almost 30 others, as well as 10 novels.
She was also a critic and journalist for several newspapers and editor -in -literary chief of a capital.
In the 1980s, she edited the Mulher feminist magazine, which was linked to the Portuguese Communist Party. (She was a member of the party from 1975 to 1989.)
No matter the genre – poetry, fiction or journalism – she planned to write a public duty.
“The obligation of a poet is not to be in an ivory tower; It is not to be isolated but to be among people ”, it said The online magazine Guernica in 2014. “As a journalist, I have never isolated myself. I was a journalist in a daily newspaper and every day I went out on the street. Every day, I had contacts with people.
She won the majority of the best literary prices in her country, but she caused a sensation in 2012 when she refused to accept the Prix de D. Dinis because she opposed the government’s policy.
She is survived by her son, Luis Jorge Horta de Barros, and two grandsons. Her husband, journalist Luis de Barros, former editor -in -chief of the newspaper O Diário, died in 2019.
“People ask me why I am a feminist,” Horta told Guernica in 2014. “Because I am a woman of freedom and equality and it is not possible to have freedom in the world while Half of humanity has no rights. “
Kirsten Noyes And Anglès Daphne contributed research.
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