The Sexes: The Case of The Three Marias

Whores or lesbians, we do not care what they call us, as long as the battle is fought and not lost . . . Enough. It is time to cry “Enough!” and to form a block with our bodies.

These words are taken from a collection of ardently feminist writings that “outrage public morals” and “abuse the freedom of the press.” That at least is the charge brought against the three women authors of the collection when the censors in Portugal issued a warrant for their arrest and banned their book, New Portuguese Letters, a commentary on the lot of women in machismo-oriented Portugal. To feminists round the world, as well as to champions of a free press, the police action against the Portuguese women in June 1972 was an outrage that slowly became the focus of an international protest movement. Last week it looked as if the movement might bear fruit: although the three writers face jail terms of up to two years, observers were predicting that the court would impose only fines or suspended sentences when the case comes to trial next October.

The 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 in the U.S. next year by Doubleday. The work was inspired by the still widely read 17th century Letters of a Portuguese Nun, supposedly written to a French officer who had seduced and then deserted her.* The New Portuguese Letters consists of 15 fictional letters, along with poems, essays and manifestos, describing the betrayal and disillusionment of contemporary woman.

“In the first Portuguese Letters,” Barreno explained to TIME, “it was a nun who was cloistered. In the new 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.”

Phallic Women. Of the three authors, Horta is the most fervently feminist: “I am not for the emancipation of women, but for their liberation. Emancipation is only a legal term, only a political event. It is the pathetic attempt of women trying to be like men, to make it in a male world. But liberation—ah, that is freedom. That is when man is removed entirely as the model of behavior and a woman is free to become herself.” Horta believes that men, too, are oppressed. “But the relative pain of the two sexes is not comparable. Besides the social system, which rides all humanity, women have a specific aggressor: men. Not just any men, but the intimate partners, fathers, brothers, sons in their lives.”

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, we’ll all end up getting burned.”

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 objections. Having brought charges against the three Marias, authorities then released them on bail of 15,000 escudos ($700) each. Their trial was originally set for July 3 but has been postponed to permit Writer Horta, ill with tuberculosis, to recover sufficiently to withstand prolonged court proceedings.

Meanwhile, Portuguese intellectuals protested the banning of the books as did the American P.E.N., the noted association of writers. A group of British authors, among them Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and Stephen Spender, wrote a letter to the Times of London attesting to the book’s literary value and “strict moral intention.”

In the U.S., a conference sponsored by the National Organization for Women voted to make the case the first international feminist cause. To further it, women in five U.S. and seven foreign cities staged demonstrations on the date originally set for the trial. When 50 protesters gathered on the lawn of the Portuguese consulate in Boston, Vice Consul Carlos Nunes relayed a curt reproof from his boss, Consul General George Freitas: “The world would be a better place if each person would mind his own business.” To which one woman responded, “And you are minding the business of the three Marias—which is why we are all here.”

* Now generally attributed to the French author and diplomat Gabriel Joseph de LaVergne, Vicomte de Guilleragues. When first published, the book was described as a French translation of five genuine letters.