"The Three Marias" became an international cause célèbre. Maria Velho da Costa, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Isabel Barrreno co-wrote the banned anti-Fascist work of feminism, Novas Cartas Portuguesas (New Portuguese Letters) (1972).
Writer Maria Teresa Horta died in her Lisbon home at the age of 87 on February 4, two months after the BBC named her one of the 100 most influential women of the world, perhaps best known for the case of the three Marias, of which she was the last one, and which "made headlines and inspired protests worldwide" for women's equality.
In an interview with Guernica (April 15, 2014), the writer explained her reason for being a feminist:
"There is a popular saying that goes: 'Mother, what is it to be married?' And the mothers say: 'Daughter, it is to give birth and to cry.' This is the image of the Portuguese woman. It is this. To live without joy. I usually say all people have the right to be happy when they are born. All. It is a right of every citizen, male and female and, I, as a feminist, fight for that in relation to the woman."
What was the catalyst for "The Three Marias" joint writing project?
Leaving her home in Lisbon one summer's evening in 1971, Maria Teresa Horta noticed a car following her, reported The Economist (June 23, 2022).
She had recently published a volume of poetry, Minha Senhora de Mim (My Lady of Myself), which reflected on female sexual pleasure. Portugal's dictatorial regime, led by Marcello Caetano, did not approve.
The goons in the car confronted the 34-year-old woman, warning her not to write such smut again. They beat her up so badly that she ended up in hospital.
After her release, the writer could have put her head and her pen down. Instead, she lifted her head up high and opposed the bullying regime with her sword, her pen.
Giving into bullies emboldens them and only incites them to expand their target groups. In the end, no one is safe if one group is not safe, whether in Portugal, the United States, anywhere.
"A few days later, she turned up to lunch with two friends who were also writers. They were appalled. 'God, if a single woman has something like that happen to her because of a book of poetry,' Maria Velho da Costa said, "Imagine if the three of us wrote a novel."
So, they did something just like that. What courage!
Maria Velho da Costa (1938-2020), Maria Teresa Horta (1937-2025) and Maria Isabel Barrreno (1939-2016) met every week for nine months to review their work, vowing to never reveal to the public who wrote what. They kept their word.
Novas Cartas Portuguesas (New Portuguese Letters) (1972) is a mix of poems, letters and essays. It was inspired by Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669), often ascribed to a Franciscan nun addressing her former French lover and describing being kept in a convent in Beja, in the Alentejo, against her will. The authors felt that this was an apt metaphor for women's lives in modern Portugal.
"What woman is not a nun, sacrificed, self-sacrificing, without a life of her own, sequestered from the world?” they wrote. “What change has there been in the life of women through the centuries?"
"Using a bewildering cast of characters, they comment on the subjugation of women at home, misogynist laws, sexual and domestic violence, abortion, the Catholic church and the colonial wars Portugal was waging in Africa," according to The Economist.
The book went against the prevailing political ideology and the "comfort of the great certainties" of the Estado Novo regime, which António de Oliveira Salazar had declared and was approved in the Portuguese Constitution of 1933. "We don't discuss fatherland and its history; we don't discuss authority and its prestige; we don't discuss family and ethics", reported The Irish Times (November 15, 2021).
"Women's position as second-class citizens in this environment was underlined by the Portuguese penal code which said a man could murder his adulterous wife and only have to 'leave his district' for six months," reported The Irish Times.
"Being a feminist was a demeaning thing," said Maria Teresa Horta, in an interview with Público (February 23, 2024).
Three days after its publication, tipped off by the printers, the government banned the book, seizing copies on the grounds that the text was "irreparably pornographic and incompatible with public morality", reported The Irish Times and The Economist.
"The Three Marias" were charged with abusing the freedom of the press and released on bail. A trial was set for 1973.
Head of State Marcello Caetano described them as three women "who aren't worthy of being Portuguese", reported The Irish Times.
Portuguese media were not permitted to report on the case, reported The Economist. Because the book was banned, today, many Portuguese have heard of Novas Cartas Portuguesas but not read it.
Book Bans, Media Censorship in U.S.
The censorship of media and banning of books are things of the past in Portugal. They belong to an inhumane regime that was overthrown in 1974. Today, the United States seems to be lulling itself into these practices.
Since 2021, thousands of books have been banned or challenged in parts of the United States, according to the writers' association, PEN America, as well as the conservative think tank, American Enterprise Institute. Most of the books have to do with race, gender and sexuality. Just weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump's second administration called book bans a "hoax", it purged books in schools run by the Department of Defense, serving 67,000 children around the world, according to PEN (February 14).
As for media censorship, the White House announced last week that it is indefinitely blocking Associated Press journalists from accessing the Oval Office and Air Force One amid a growing standoff between Trump's regime and the global news agency over the Gulf of Mexico's name, reported The Guardian (February 14).
First International Feminist Cause
In Portugal, in 1972, most copies of Novas Cartas Portuguesas had sold before it was banned by the government. At least one copy was smuggled to Paris. Eventually, the book was published in New York.
French newspapers published excerpts of the text. In Britain, authors, including Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and Jean Rhys, wrote to The Times expressing their disgust with the trio's treatment, reported The Economist. At the International Feminist Planning Conference held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in June 1973, and organized by the National Organization for Women (NOW), representatives of dozens of countries agreed to rally round "The Three Marias".
The suppression of New Portuguese Letters became the first international feminist cause, known from Buenos Aires to Islamabad, reported The Economist.
Women round the world put pressure on Caetano’s government by signing petitions, writing letters to embassies and appealing to the U.N. Human Rights Commission. In London and New York, theaters hosted readings from the book; women in Brussels and Paris marched in solidarity. In The Hague, feminists climbed onto the roof of the Portuguese embassy and unfurled a banner.
The trial of "The Three Marias" ended days after the April 25, 1974 Carnation Revolution. On May 7, they were acquitted and "ordered to go in peace with carnations to the chest". The judge said: "The book isn't pornographic or immoral. Quite the opposite: it's a work of art of the highest quality," reported The Irish Times.
Two years later, the new Portuguese constitution enshrined the absolute equality of rights between men and women. One can hear the insistent voice of the activist Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, who had fought for human rights and those of "The Three Marias". She would become Portugal's first woman prime minister.
In 1979, during Pintasilgo's administration, Maria Teresa Horta took on the role of assistant to the Secretary of State for Culture, according to Comunidade Cultura e Arte (July 10, 2018).
"(My childhood and my parents) are part of my imagination, my poetic imagination. Nothing is lost. Everything is found. This is part of who I have become. And what I have become is made up of what I have or have not resolved. Our mother is our genesis. She's where we start from.
There's no deception. I did psychoanalysis for 17 years, and who we are comes from our genesis, from our education," Maria Teresa Horta told Expresso (August 8, 2017). (Photo from Rádio Nova)
Her Beginnings
Maria Teresa Horta was born in Lisbon on May 20, 1937. Her father, Jorge Augusto da Silva Horta was "a prominent doctor and conservative who supported the dictatorship", and her mother Carlota Maria Mascarenhas, according to Pais ao Minuto (February 12), which reported on her obituary in The New York Times the previous day.
"My grandmother, who taught me to read, was a suffragette," the writer told Expresso (August 8, 2017). "I only found out later, through Maria Lamas, even though I went to meetings with her since I was little. At the time, I thought I was going to friends' houses."
The suffragette's granddaughter graduated from the University of Lisbon, publishing her first poems at age 19 in newspapers and her first book of poetry at the age of 23. In this early phase of her career, she became involved in Lisbon's cultural scene, becoming a director of the ABC Film Club, according to Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal. She would write about 30 more poetry collections as well as 10 novels.
The Lisbon native was also a critic and reporter for several newspapers. Following her collaborations with the press, Maria Teresa Horta was one of a few women invited to join the newspaper A Capital, a paper not linked to the regime and established in February 1968.
The author began a long career in journalism, which ran parallel to her work as a poet, novelist and activist for women's rights. At A Capital, she was responsible for the supplement Literature e Arte between March 1968 and March 1972, when the Censorship Department prohibited the publication of texts signed with her name and pressured for her dismissal, according to Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.
In the 1980s, she edited the feminist magazine Mulheres, which was linked to the Communist Party, of which she was a member from 1975 to 1989, according to Pais ao Minuto.
Maria Teresa Horta's work and career were the subject of public distinctions at the end of her life, according to Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.
She was awarded the D. Dinis Prize in 2011 for her novel Luzes de Leonor (The Lights of Leonor), which the writer refused to accept from the hands of the then-Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, reported Guernica. She had participated in a recent demonstration, which would have rendered her acceptance of the award from the head of state as inconsistent with her views, reported RTP News (September 28, 2012).
In Luzes de Leonor, the novelist pursues Leonor de Lorena (1750-1839), the Marquise de Alorna and the granddaughter of the Marquises of Távora, who also happened to be Maria Teresa's quinta avó (fifth-degree grandmother). Leonor was a unique female figure in the literary and political history of Portugal. She was the author of a vast body of poetry, some of which was published during her lifetime, reported RTP News (January 4, 2012).
"Because I have a problem with aristocracy, it was Leonor (and the writing of the book about her) that reconciled me with that side of the family. For the first time, I said that she was my grandmother," the author told Expresso.
In 2014, Maria Teresa Horta received the Prémio Consagração de Carreira from the Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores; in 2017, she won the prize for best poetry book, Anunciações, from the Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores; in 2021, she was distinguished with the Casino da Póvoa-Correntes d'Escritas Literary Prize for the book Estranhezas, and, in 2024, she was awarded the Rodrigues Sampaio Prize from the Porto Association of Journalists and Men of Letters, according to Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.
In official recognition of her career, the Portuguese state decorated her, in 2004, with the rank of Grand Officer of the Order of Infante D. Henrique; in 2020, with the Medal of Cultural Merit, and, in 2022, with the rank of Grand Officer of the Order of Liberty.
Marriage
The poet married at 17 to get away from her father, who did not approve of her writing or her subject matter. An only child, her mother, "a very unstable person, and the more depressed she became, the more beautiful she seemed", had left her father. "The truth is that I spend my life excusing my mother and saying that she couldn't have done it any other way."
Her grandmother, who lived with them and was "the great support" of her life, died one month later. She told Expresso that she married out of friendship because it was the only way she could leave home.
In answer to SAPO24's (March 8, 2017) question of what it means to be a feminist, Maria Teresa Horta talked about her second marriage:
"Being a feminist is not about not loving your family, your children, people. I have a wonderful family and a man I have been in love with for 52 years, but passion, passion! . . . This story that love passes and friendship remains is a lie. It doesn't. Then the woman is left, the slave, doing all the things, and he doesn't even look at her anymore. I find that so sad, that would never be my life.
"This friendship thing is very beautiful, but I don't get married out of friendship, do I? I don't go around ironing my friends' trousers out of friendship. I don't care for them when they're sick. Would I spend my whole life with a man I wasn't in love with?
"I still write love poems for him every day!"
Expresso (August 8, 2017) said to her: "But then, you don't mind taking care of the house, ironing, cooking, washing the dishes:"
"That's not true. I hate it. I do it because I don't have any money. Everything has a price. It's my life. Living a strict life, having certain principles and never forgetting who I am, has its costs. It's one of the things I'm most proud of. I've never done anything I'm ashamed of."
The writer is survived by a son, Luís Jorge Horta de Barros, and two grandsons. Her husband, journalist Luís de Barros, former editor of O Diário, died in 2019.
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