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In the 50s, I lived my twenties. It
was a time of intense life, activities, interests, in the emotions. It was
a time of intense life, in activities, interests, emotions. I often had
the feeling that I was reaping the fruits before having seeded them.
In the 50s, I was a student of
Técnico, I have finished the course, have approached the professional
life. I started the research on nuclear energy - I had the task of
studying methods for the determination of U235 in uranium ores existing in
Portugal. (At the time, internationally, the young professionals who were
devoted to nuclear physics questioned themselves on whether "the use of
nuclear energy for peaceful purposes" legitimized the work in an area that
had produced Hiroxima.i.) Then, was the participation in the reality of
the industry, the entry in the technical world, highly competitive, of the
Union Manufacturing Company. There, I was part of a pioneering team that
was taking its first steps in organizing industry scientific research in
Portugal. With my teammates, we were looking for the theoretical
foundations for the resolution of practical problems which until then were
resolved in Portugal by recourse to foreign experts. It was incumbent upon
me the systematic analysis of the scientific literature with implications
for the various branches of the company and, in this context I published
every fortnight the bibliographic cards of the research activities that
had impact on the production and manufacture control work; I launched the
publication of the magazine Industry; I organized weekly, colloquiums of
scientific update for the management of the company. My life framework was
then the week of forty-eight hours of work, the pollution of the
working-class neighbourhood next to the factories and, later, the three
hours of transport between Barreiro and Lisboa...
In the 50s - I was twenty-four years
old -I lived full independence from the family. Another home, another
place. It was not usual: girls just left the family home when they
married. This was the time that I learned how to organize everything by
myself, alone – an experience that millions of women would have years
later, taken by the "wave" of the women's movement. It was also the time
that I discovered that there were other structures of community life to
create and invent, through enlarged coexistence, mutual aid,
dissemination. If the nuclear family was not, for some of us, the life
framework, was still less the closed universe of a house populated by
"things", leaving on the threshold of the door the care and responsibility
for others ...
In the 50s, I discovered
Christianity linked to life, leading to a great social commitment and
based on what we called "the intellectual vocation". We were several
generations, coming from all the faculties of Lisbon, Porto and Coimbra
(the only universities, of that time) wanting to transform the University,
wanting to put it at the service of society, to demand of ourselves a life
devoted to others, through the "thought" and that we called then "the
well-done service ethics". We did in 1953 a great National Congress with
two thousand students from all universities and an inquiry about
twenty-five per cent of the student population. We thought that we would
change everything!
In these years, I have organised
dozens of meetings, conferences, and drove working groups. I learned the
methodology of intellectual work, and assuming my responsibilities that
widen beyond the traditional tasks of my own limitations, I learned the
requirements of leadership. For four years, I was president of JUCF -
meetings/seminars/ holiday camps/publications and all weekends filled,
filled. It was a Catholic culture - a subculture in the life of the
country - but where young women (between 17 and 25 years) learned by
themselves to plan, to have strategies, to deepen the big issues. The
laity represented then in the Church a great strength - and the women used
it.
In the 50s, I intoxicated myself
with literature and music. I studied and worked at the sound of “Emissora
2” (with the first salary I bought the pick-up and the first record: the
concert No 3 for piano and orchestra of Prokofiev) and stayed until late
hours immersed in the reading of Gertrude von le Fort, Francois Mauriac,
Paul Claudel, Bemanos, Péguy. Universes of absolute passion, affection
perversion in the same exaggeration, sacrifices without sublimation, the
gift of self in the exaltation of the work performed, the mystic crossing
the thick density of violent affections. It was also the time of “Diários
de Miguel Torga”, of his poems and of national identity that he was
unveiling, travelling through the country, inch for inch, and to recognize
the stones and the people. For my generation, the poetry scored events,
emotions, states of soul. The Attica published the poetical works of
Fernando Pessoa. And how could young engineers, to live - they thought...
- A new phase in the country's life, not to let themselves be taken in by
this another engineer, who was Álvaro de Campos?
It was also in the 50s that was born
and grew up in me what would be a deep conviction about the role of women
in society. My female friends of the time of University made decided
options. The vast majority intermarry with colleagues, had the first child
and were at the same time professionals of great competence. Girls had a
friendship of intense sharing, joint projects, of ideal analysed and
discussed, of endless letters. With the boys an unpretentious fellowship,
and, in many cases, a friendship that became stronger in implicit
recognition of the difference between the sexes and that manifested itself
in a certain relationship containment. The game of words, the pleasure of
irony with different weapons, the dialog of ideas crossed by emotions and
affections - the music of the relationship between the sexes it fell in a
varied range of signs without translation in the customs of today.
Through the University Social Action
and, later, in the manufacturing environment, I realized that the women
lived not only sexually, discriminated by men but dominated by them, in
ways that violated all the dignity of the human person. In workshops only
to women, the foremen demanded silence face to all sorts of sexual
blackmail. The JOCF - very strong labour movement – was not afraid to
denounce one case after another. Then I realized that the condition of the
workers, which led me to the engineering, overlapped, in the case of
workers, their condition of women. The physical conditions of work were
unacceptable; abortions came to reach six or seven for each woman working
in factories - was a marked distress in aged faces of women who had not
reached yet the age of 30 years. But the sexual violence went further and
the fight against the causes of prostitution took very different aspects.
The few parliamentarian women were rather tired of 'denounce in the
National Assembly the prostitution. But it was in the Catholic subculture
that was sought to find the socio-economic roots of the problem and that
appeared some "prophets" with bold initiatives.
It has been in the 50sthat I began
to live the "dimensions of the world": the discovery of a near and distant
Europe, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, the exaltation of the first friendships
with people from other lands who gave human physiognomy to that until then
was only geography. (How we were thrilled with Jean-Christophe of Romain
Rolland, where merged and completed the Latin aspect and the aspect of
Germanic Europe).
In 1957, the year of the first
independence of an African country, Ghana, chaired in Accra to the 1st
Seminar for Catholic Students of the Universities of South Africa of the
Sahara. I received N'Krumah, I made a welcome speech - and, on my return
to Lisbon, I was called to the various authorities of the time to justify
my enthusiasm for the independence of colonized countries... I don't know
what have marked me more in this first contact with Africa - if the felt
for the first time what is the breath of the tropical forest that at night
"speaks" and feel grow, if the baffled at a country that started to be it,
and the questions that were born: what is more important to do? Where to
start? - Only schools of agriculture, medicine, engineering? Or also the
humanities, law, things which do not seem immediately useful? In the
seminar participated the first generation of university students from
black Africa. Makerere College, with a mere ten years, seemed already an
'old' university...
After Africa, came my first contact
with Latin America, in El Salvador. Over there, another perplexity: how to
adjust my incipient ideas and theories about the development, to the huge
gap between those who have everything and those in the city centre jostled
to try to sell here a fruit, a piece of craftsmanship, that could
guarantee them the necessary to kill the hunger?
In that decade, dates still my
encounter with the United States. Took place in a very special framework:
the discovery of life and of social expressions and the cultural movement
of the Grail. And even now I do not know if the creativity that seduced me
was a general environment (if it would be in an America still affected by
McCarthyism or by conservative ideas about the place of women in society?)
or generalize to the whole of America which I found in one of the groups
with higher intellectual dynamism and, at the same time, as one of the
most radical and pioneering proposals for alternative forms of society.
In the 50s, I experienced a decisive
phase of my understanding of the world and of my relationship to the
events, to work, to things. Stimulated by the teachers and exceptional
colleagues, I was looking for the meaning of the laws of the physical
universe, the degree of similarity between the processes that were within
the subject and those who had place in society or even between two people.
Fascinated me the conceptual universe that opened up the fundamental
equations of Physics, "knew" that everything. Moves by quantum leaps, that
each statement is a statement of probability, that the "energy" is, at the
same time, a material reality and an immaterial reality. It began for me
the analogical thought that I would help the "circular" between various
forms of knowledge - and that, in a special way, would help to deepen the
Christian Faith. And yet, at another level, was taking shape in me an
interdisciplinary approach which, having of course its root in exact
sciences, would lead to other areas and, in particular, understanding the
political issue. But it was not that what the "engineer" taught us:
"Newton's binomial is as beautiful as the Venus of Milo. But, few people
see that"
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