THE EMERGENCE OF PORTUGUESE FEMININE VOICES

§1.

As it is well known, Portugal lived under a dictatorship which lasted for more than forty years, with a colonial war in three of its African colonies during the last thirteen years of the regime. This situation was brought to an end in 1974, by the 25th of April 'Revolution'. All through those decades, there was a triple exodus of the male population, a fact which had a very strong impact in what concerned both the status of women and the relations between sexes, in Portuguese society. I am referring to the departure of the military to the African colonies, to the political exile of so many young men who chose to desert, and to the huge wave of emmigration which, in those days, headed to the richest countries of Europe. That flight of men generated a succession of relevant changes in the social and cultural situation of women, who enjoyed a number of opportunities which had been hitherto out of reach. This happened, for instance, in the sector of agriculture, where duties and tasks usually performed by men changed hands; in the sector of services, where they began to be offered jobs, and also in the universities, where the vacant places left by the young officers who had departed to the war opened vacancies for the girls, who begun to have easier access to university courses. At that time, a reasonable number of young adult women took over a new space and duties, which would never have been opened and entrusted to them if the circumstances had been different.

After the so-called 'Revolution' of [the 25^th of] April 1974, a number of important structural and mental changes took place. One of the most outstanding, in what regards the life of women, was, beyond any doubt, the approval of the new Constitution and of the new Civil Code－texts which established a clear equality of rights between sexes. One could say, that with the exception of a few articles of the Penal Code, there has been, since the last years of the seventies, the acknowledgement of a judicial equality between men and women, something which has not happened yet in most Western countries.

At the highest professional level, in civil service as well as in liberal professions, in arts and education, there are clearly innovative situations in which there is not only a real equality but even a new inequality, in the sense that in several areas women have a clear advantage, outnumbering men. As an example, the most recently available statistical data1 concerning feminine presence in Portuguese universities showed, when compared with other Western countries, a situation of greater openness and wider participation of women: a growing number of women students and teachers, many of them with directive duties. The data for 1990-1991 showed that 55% of the applications to university were made by women, and 65.9% of diplomas are granted to them－out of this set of numbers it is important to underline the percentage of feminine degrees on subjects previously reserved almost exclusively to men:

71.3% in Medicine; 56.7% in Mathematics and Informatics; 67.4% in Exact Sciences; 56.0% in Law; 33.9% in Architecture and Town Planning 30.3% in Engineering; 67,9% in Engenharia de Produção Industrial (Industrial Production Engineering); etc. 2

If, furthermore, we take into account, for the mentioned period, the feminine doctoral degrees, we can see they represented 42.4% of the total figure for Exact Sciences, and 29.7% for Human and Social Sciences. 3 Today, in the middle of the nineties, the percentage of feminine enrolments in the universities seems to have grown, grosso modo, to 68% of the total (which, curiously, is already starting to concern our Ministery of Education!). Also in the domain of Arts and Literature, there is no doubt that several artistic and literary awards, for example, have not been suffering any attitude of 'sexual' discrimination in their choices.

Nevertheless, and in spite of all the openess and change, a secular patriarchal attitude still remains in present day Portuguese society, i. e., a declared 'machism', for the laws, although constituting a fundamental instrument of change cannot, by themselves, bring about a change in mentality. It is impossible to deny, in daily life, the existence of numerous and deep inequalities based on sexual discrimination－either at the level of private and political life, either at the level of the average and low wages or professional careers－, these inequalities might be considered subtle, but in fact they are effective.

Obviously, it is in the political sphere that that patriarchal and discriminatory attitude is more clear. It is there that a more scandalous difference in feminine participation and women's responsibilities manifests itself, because it is in politics that the real power is at stake. 4 In that sphere of real power, men are still the ones to decide everything and, even more, they seem to be willing to keep on doing it. Every time that women took on political duties－and that has been happening in these past decades－it is undeniable that they took, not only the less interesting and less respected places but also that they were given those places by men.

In Portugal, we had the occasion to live a real situation which became a paradigm of masculine behaviour in this mater: the existence of a Prime Minister, in 1979, Maria de Lourdes Pintassilgo-up until now the only one among us to occupy such a place-allowed the possibility to observe a whole range of masculine reactions in the face of feminine exercise of power. Curiously, it was a range of 'normalized reactions', almost unanimous, of dissatisfaction and fear, of aggressivity and (almost) always of critical irrationality. Those reactions came from differentiated political and social spaces (parties, media, etc.) and they showed that which must have caused the most irritation and upset to the masculine half of the country: a different form of government, understood as a 'service', with marked feminine characteristics. As it was possible to see at the time, it was an attitude which in a certain way brought 'utopia to power' again, and, above all, because this innovation was operated without their consent or control, it carried along an unbearable margin of insecurity to men, which expressed itself through a ruthless rejection on their part.

We may ask ourselves if the way men tend to cling to political power－besides the deeply rooted pleasure in deciding everything among themselves－is not, above all, a sign of their fear in face of the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, that women－as they enter the masculine 'domain' and as they reach power－would unavoidably bring along with them, clearly questioning an already known style of masculine government.

It is significant to have been observing, during the last decades, firstly, a clear growth in the number of women in politics, and secondly, an equally clear decrease of that number. Recent soundings, as inaccurate as they may be, but nevertheless meaningful, showed that the majority of women who already had political responsibilities (Ministers, Secretaries of State, Members of Parliament, etc.) became less and less interested in such duties. 5 Their reasons are due to the limits (rigid hierarchy, bureaucracy, authoritariansm, etc.) they detected in the political system: in the party and governmental structures,and in their overall functioning. Unless we witness radical changes at those levels, women will probably not be willing to return to the world of politics－with, of course, all the exceptions that confirm the rule.

However, the current massive presence of women, either in important directive places in several sectors, either in universities (where feminine students frequently obtain the best classifications), 6 leads us to an unavoidable question as to the relationship between men and women in Portuguese society of the next decades: will men still be able to keep－within, let us say, ten or fifteen years－the same political power they now hold? Quantity changes quality, we have known that at least since Marx. And perhaps, in a not so distant future, the Portuguese society, with such a high number of women with qualifications of the highest level, will be forced to stop speaking, even in the world of politics, the same one and only 'language': the masculine. In the words of the Brazilian writer Rosiska Darcy d'Oliveira:

"We shall stop speaking 'men', with or without accent, we shall also start to speak 'women'."

For the majority of men, this is still seen as a kind of handicap, i. e., as an 'accent' of femininity regarding the masculine 'norm', does no matter at what level. Well, the fact is that with the access of a significant number of women to the places of decision, the 'language', the structures, the rules, both cultural and political, will very likely be 'demasculinized', that is, we will stop speaking only one 'language', we will became 'bilingual'. Thus, a new space will be opened to other ways of life, and to news forms of expressing it. "To speak 'woman'" will thence be the revelation of a new subjectivity, the expression of another identity－the feminine－, which renounces the dominant masculine models to raise their own voice: in attitudes and decisions, in the establishing of priorities or hierarchies, in 'language', in the meaning given to the "being-with-others-in-the-world", as Martin Buber said.

§2.

Regarding this subject, we glimpsed a few signs of change offered by the most recent Portuguese literature. This happened because, among other things, the works of art emerged as filtering mirrors－deforming or re-creating and inventive－of reality as-it-is. And also because, to a certain extent, art and literature, contained elements which somehow antecipate future realities.

Portuguese fictional narrative after the 25^th of April 1974, also in the masculine 'voices', but above all in the feminine ones, 7 showed traces of a different identity－a feminine identity－with new and still not completely unveiled features, almost invisible to the eye of the public.

In the novels after 1974, both of masculine and feminine authorship, we saw a special interest in themes connected with the social-political-cultural Portuguese reality of those years, as well as in themes of remote or recent history. Subjects like the April 'Revolution', the Colonial War, emigration, or the return of emigrants, political exilees, military, or the evaluation of national identity - all of them re-created as testimonies and/or in inventive, fantastic or magical realism forms, dominated our best fictional narrative in the last three decades. Thus, we might say that men and women wrote about the same themes.

In opposition to what happened in other Western Literature, very seldom do we found Portuguese woman writers centred upon themselves as women: upon their private and/or collective obsessions, for example. (This surely was a result of the impact of the 25th of April 1974 in Portuguese society as well as of the absence of, among the Portuguese, of meaningful feminist movements). Their texts, however, revealed, among other things, perspectives, modes of perception, of attention, of contemplation of reality, interpretation of events and relations, forms of sensibility and sensuality, and the prevailing of a logic of affection over pure rationality, which were extremely different from those found in texts of masculine authorship.

Let us examine a few examples:

In several feminine authors, we were able to find an intimate connection between writing and life, between writing and the body, which was very rare in texts of masculine origin. Of this we have the account of voices like Yvette Centeno, in her novel Matriz (Matrix) (1988):

"[...] I only take note of what insists with me, [..] of what infiltrates, so to speak, in my blood, and if it remains unwritten it does not let me live."8

Teolinda Gersão, in O Silêncio (The Silence) (1981):

"[...] the word spoken, on the surface of the body, undistinguishable from the body."9

Maria Isabel Barreno, in O Inventário de Ana (Ana's Inventory) (1982):

"A certain way of dealing with things which women have: caressing, while cleaning, the awareness of the fingers, attentive to all the edges, surfaces and measures [...] Sustaining us: in the hands, on the palm, next to the lines of destiny and life. In the personality of women the objects of daily life incorporate, through the light touch of the hands.

It is like a methodic meditation when they worry, trying to ease tensions, and balance things before speaking or acting _ the equivalent of the somber ways of the philosophic men, who by brushing and tidying up ideas seek the solution for the same mysteries. In the delicate drawing of the skin the print of all the universe will be recognized."10

In Teresa Salema and Maria Gabriela Llansol, among so many others, a plural perception of reality, frequently shines through－a sensuality which apprehends reality with all the senses, which we can find in these two examples from O lugar ausente (Absent Place) (1991) and Finita (Finite) (1987), respectively, which demonstrate the tones and hues of a way of feeling, speaking or writing, in the feminine:

"The stories were defined [...] through the memory of a fleeting luminosity on the skin, a fragrance felt as only one, a chord suspended in the moment."11

"[...] to plunge the clothes in water and soap, the clothes which cover and protect the different parts of the body, or are a complement of windows and furniture; to witness the float of dirtiness on the surface of the water, inbetween the scented soap softened by glycerine: to meditate, with perplexity, about glass and wax, when carrying it, the hand slowly goes by leaving, on the wooden floor, a light; to sweep the floor which is the way that connects the several parts of the house, those of the day and those of the night; to close the eyes over the noises, the smells and the lamps, each one with its destiny; to remain in the vibrations of this receptive space waiting for someone to come in and become the awaited visitor: Rilke, Munzer, the poor, Ana de Peñalosa[...]."12

We can also find, in these and other authors, a kind of attention focusing on secret gestures or apparentely insignificant incidents, as a means to reveal deep attitudes concerning life. In A costa dos murmúrios (The Shore of Murmurs) (1988) by Lídia Jorge, for instance, the narrator leads us to reflect on the transformation/deformation process suffered by military men during the Colonial War. She tells us how her huband, an officer and a brilliant student of Mathematics in Lisbon, started to look upon the war in Mozambique as an heroic career. For, she tells us, at night he liked to watch himself in the mirror of the room, to examine the scar which to him seemed comparable to the one of his military chief－the model-general whom he tried at all costs to imitate:

"He took me to watch the scar, as one takes someone to admire a landscape, a small corner, as one goes to a point of view for a photo.

"Can you see there? "－said he. (And she thinks to herself.) You are not anymore the person with whom I dated, and much more than that, to whom I made love until exhausted. [...] You are not the same anymore. We are lying side by side on the sand but the captain's scar separates us."

Curiously, in the novels of masculine authorship, mainly after 1974, it is possible to see a difference concerning the feminine figures. The feminine-characters created by men-writers appear, differently from the masculine-characters of the same novels, penetrated by a new vital energy, giving to both individual and collective life a clear priority which leads them to create new relationships with others, with nature, with events and, all in all, with everything.

We can feel that many of these characters are pregnant with innovation－both ethical and aesthetical－, in their attitudes and 'language'; that they hold an ancient wisdom and secret powers which are out of reach of the men with whom they live (characters, narrator or not, and even the writers themselves); that through multiple ways they search for a more spiritually comprehensive and meaningful life, not only for themselves, but for all.

I think that these features, in the quantity and quality which reveal them, constitute a sign which illuminates－in women understood both as subjects and objects of writing and as real actresses of history－a new civil, cultural and political consciousness. In short: these women, fictional, emerge as the bearers of a new dimension of life, of other kinds of ethics, another kind of organizing the hierarchy of values, which－who knows?－may become in a not-so-distant future, a reality. And that may represent an important contribution to the image of our collective identity: surely a richer identity, including in it the feminine voices which until now have remained (almost) silent in what concerns the major world and life options.

Obviously, only time will confirm this.

Translated from the Portuguese by: Rui Cascais Parada.

NOTES

1Portugal: situação das mulheres, Lisboa, CIDM, 1994－All the statistical data mentioned in this publication refers to the year 1990-1991, and was taken from the study undergone by the Comissão para a Igualdade e os Direitos das Mulheres ([CIDM] Commission for Equality and Women's Rights),

2Ibidem., p.9.

3In the years 1960-1961, there were almost only feminine doctorate degrees in Literature; in 1979-1980: 71% in Literature, 70% in Exact Sciences, and 53% in Medical Sciences. The evolution of the global percentages of feminine doctorate degrees was the following: in the sixties－5.1%; in the seventies－18,1%; in the eighties－33.7%.

4In 1994, it was ascertained that 2% of women were at the higher echelons of local power, 7% in parliament, two as Ministers of State and four as Secretaries of State.

5PEREIRA, Margarida Silva [MP] - BETTENCOURT, Ana [MP], eds., Mulheres Politicas: as suas causas, Lisboa, Quetzal, 1995－For testimonies of former Members of Parliament [MP].

6In the last years, the best results, even in courses such as Theoric Physics, have been awarded to female graduates.

7In the last twenty years in Portugal there are almost as many women writers as men.

8CENTENO, Yvette, Matriz, Porto, Presença, 1988, p. 102.

9GERSÃO, Teolinda, O Silêncio, Lisboa, Bertrand, 1981, pp. 115-116.

10Barreno, Maria Isabel, O Inventário de Ana, Lisboa, Caminho,1982, p.95.

11SALEMA, Teresa, O lugar do ausente, Lisboa, D. Quixote,1991, p.21.

12LLANSOL, Maria Gabriela, Finita, Lisboa, Rolim,1987, p.141.

13JORGE, Lídia, A costa dos murmúrios, Lisboa, D. Quixote, 1988, pp.66-67.

14See, for instance, some of the characters of novels by José Saramago, Almeida Faria, Cardoso Pires, and Vergílio Ferreira, among others.

*Lecturer in the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (New University of Lisbon), Lisbon.