Domitila de Carvalho, the first woman to study at Coimbra since 1772

In October 1891 a 20-year-old woman enrolled in the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Coimbra. Domitila Hormizinda Miranda de Carvalho, a primary teacher's daughter from a village near Santa Maria da Feira, had just finished secondary school with excellent marks and had written to the rector asking to be admitted.3 sources3 sources

The rector, António dos Santos Viegas, a professor of physics, let her in. He also laid down how she was to look. She was always to dress in black, wear a discreet hat and keep a sober manner, so that she would not stand out among her fellow students, all men, who were obliged to wear the black cape and closed cassock of Coimbra's academic dress.3 sources3 sources

She is usually called the first woman to study at Coimbra. Maria do Carmo Martins, a mathematician who has written about her, puts it more carefully: the first woman admitted there since the university's great reform of 1772. Either way she was alone. Until 1896 she was the only woman student in the whole institution, and the university's yearbooks first name a woman on its course for midwives in 1896–97.4 sources4 sources

Over the next 13 years she took degrees in mathematics, philosophy and medicine. She went on to run Lisbon's first girls' lyceum and, at 63, to sit in the National Assembly of António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo as one of its first three women deputies. Her life spanned the last kings, the First Republic and the dictatorship.3 sources3 sources

In 1891 Coimbra was the only university in Portugal. The country's university had moved there for good in 1537 and settled in the old royal palace in 1544. Lisbon and Porto had medical schools and other higher schools, but they became universities only in 1911, when the young Republic created the universities of Lisbon and Porto.4 sources4 sources

The Marquis of Pombal's statutes of 1772 had added two scientific faculties to the older ones. One was mathematics. The other, Natural Philosophy, taught physics, chemistry and natural history; the degree she later took there is recorded simply as philosophy. A philosophy degree from Coimbra was therefore a science degree. The two faculties lasted until 1911, when the Republic merged them into a single Faculty of Sciences.3 sources3 sources

No rule seems to have kept women out of the university, but nothing drew them in either. The careers a mathematics degree led to, the army, the navy and teaching, were men's careers. Girls' schooling was meant to prepare them for motherhood, and in practice it meant moral education, reading, writing, simple arithmetic and needlework.1 source1 source

Domitila de Carvalho was born on 10 April 1871 in Travanca, a parish of Santa Maria da Feira in the district of Aveiro, south of Porto. Her father, Manuel Rodrigues de Carvalho, was a primary schoolteacher. He died when she was one year old, leaving her mother, Margarida Miranda de Carvalho, with three small children.3 sources3 sources

She went to the lyceum, the state secondary school, in Castelo Branco, and continued at the lyceums of Bragança and Leiria. There was not yet a single lyceum for girls in Portugal. She finished in 1891, with marks good enough to try for Coimbra.3 sources3 sources

She finished the mathematics course in 1894 and the philosophy course a year later, both with distinction. Then she went on studying.2 sources2 sources

Next came medicine. Other women followed her to Coimbra only slowly: from 1896 she was no longer the only one, but until the Republic was proclaimed in 1910 just 23 women attended the university, seven of them on the course for midwives. In the academic year 1910–11 not a single woman worked on its staff.2 sources2 sources

She finished medicine in 1904, with a final mark of 16 out of 20. According to Martins, Queen Amélia, wife of King Carlos, was her madrinha, or sponsor, for the degree. The press of the day praised her achievements, seeing them as a promising sign for other women who wanted to follow her.3 sources3 sources

After graduating she worked as a doctor in Lisbon for the Assistência Nacional aos Tuberculosos, the national tuberculosis charity, and, according to She Thought It, at a centre for mothers and infants. Alongside this she took up teaching. In 1906 a royal decree created the Liceu Maria Pia in Lisbon, the first girls' lyceum in the country, and she became a permanent teacher there.3 sources3 sources

She was also its rector, from its foundation on 23 February 1906 until November 1912, and taught mathematics. Martins and the She Thought It project, which documents women in the sciences and arts from the University of Porto, both call her the first Portuguese woman to teach the subject. The new school offered only the general course. Girls who wanted the complementary course that led to university still had to go to a boys' lyceum.2 sources2 sources

She went on teaching mathematics at the same school until she retired, as its name changed: Liceu de Almeida Garrett in 1917, then Liceu Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, after the writer about whom she published a book in 1930. From 1933 the school had a building of its own on Rua Rodrigo da Fonseca, designed by Miguel Ventura Terra, the first in Portugal built for a girls' lyceum.3 sources3 sources

In those years she worked with women of other camps. In 1906 she joined the Feminist Section of the Portuguese League for Peace. In 1909, although she was a Catholic who held marriage to be indissoluble, she signed the list supporting a divorce law put forward by the Republican League of Portuguese Women. The same year she published a book of poems, Versos.2 sources2 sources

Over her career she became a corresponding member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences and a member of the Conselho Superior de Instrução Pública, the government's advisory council on education, and joined the association of Portuguese Catholic doctors. In 1919 she published the lesson she had given her pupils on the thirtieth day after the death of Sidónio Pais, the army major and Coimbra mathematics professor who had seized power in December 1917 and was assassinated a year later.3 sources3 sources

The First Republic never gave women the vote. The dictatorship did, on its own terms. Decree 19 694 of 5 May 1931 let some women vote, under stricter conditions than men, and Decree-Law 23 406 of 27 December 1933 allowed women to stand. The União Nacional, the regime's only party, put three women on its list for the first elections to the new National Assembly.3 sources3 sources

The election was held in December 1934. Men over 21 could vote if they could read or paid at least 100 escudos in tax; women needed a secondary, higher or special diploma. Domitila de Carvalho was 63. On 10 January 1935, at the Assembly's preparatory session, her name was in the roll of deputies present, and all 90 members were proclaimed elected.3 sources3 sources

On 21 February 1935, in the time before the order of the day, she rose to table a bill. It made a course in general hygiene and puericultura, the care of infants, compulsory in every girls' lyceum, taught by a woman doctor on the staff or, failing one, by the school doctor, with two one-hour lessons a week in the third to fifth years and one of an hour and a half in the sixth and seventh. Her justification was one statistic.2 sources2 sources

Most of those deaths, she said, were due to mothers' ignorance, and the future mothers had to be prepared. The written bill added that diarrhoea and enteritis were the first cause of death among children under two, at 37.5 per cent. The historians Áurea Adão and Maria José Remédios note that such courses already existed at the Instituto de Odivelas, the school for officers' daughters, and that the idea, common in Europe, made women alone answerable for infant deaths.2 sources2 sources

Parliament's record lists her other interventions. In her first term she spoke on the reform of secondary schooling, a statue to Sidónio Pais, the winter relief campaign for the poor, the reorganisation of the education ministry, the Casas dos Pescadores, the regime's fishermen's welfare houses, and new courthouses. Re-elected in 1938, she spoke on children at cinemas and theatres, primary teachers' qualifications and university fees. None of the women deputies of those years was chosen for the Assembly's presidency or as one of its secretaries.2 sources2 sources

Even the forms of address set them apart. Adão and Remédios point out that male deputies were called by their titles, Sr. Engenheiro or Sr. Conselheiro, while the women, all of them graduates, were addressed only as Dona, the word for a lady of standing. In the Diário das Sessões, the Assembly's record, the doctor with three degrees appears as “a Sr.ª D. Domitila de Carvalho”.3 sources3 sources

Parliament's biographical record sums up her politics in five lines: a monarchist and friend of Queen Amélia; a convinced Catholic; fascinated by Sidónio Pais; a devoted admirer of Salazar; and descrente do feminismo, an unbeliever in feminism. Martins adds that she acted as a go-between for Salazar and the exiled queen.2 sources2 sources

Her speeches fit that portrait. In the debate on putting crucifixes in schools she condemned the secular state school for feeding, as she saw it, one of the great evils of modern societies, the falling birth rate, and asked whether teaching without God could satisfy the soul. Speaking for a statue to Sidónio Pais, she held him up as the model statesman, in words quoted by Adão and Remédios and translated here, “lit by his dream of redemption, eyes fixed on God and the Fatherland”.1 source1 source

In 1936 she joined the board of the Obra das Mães pela Educação Nacional, the regime's organisation for mothers, and in May that year gave a lecture, “Communism against childhood”, that condemned the “fanaticism of the collectivist state” for taking children from their parents.2 sources2 sources

Susana Mota, writing on women under the Estado Novo, points out that being among the first women in politics did not mean breaking the codes that governed women's conduct: the three deputies kept to the regime's line of “God, Fatherland and Family”. Yet all three had university degrees and careers, and none had children. Their lives were not the ones the regime held up for women.3 sources3 sources

Her second term ended with the legislature in 1942, although Martins and She Thought It give 1941. Her last recorded speech, on university fees, was in November 1941. She kept writing, and published Para o alto in 1957. She never married. She died in Lisbon on 11 November 1966, aged 95.4 sources4 sources

Coimbra changed slowly after her. In 1911 the German-born philologist Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, then 60, became the university's first woman professor, and she was its only one until her death in 1925. Another woman held a teaching post there only in 1938. The physicists Gilberto Pereira, Décio Martins and Carlos Fiolhais describe women's presence at Coimbra in those decades, as students or teachers, as “always residual”.1 source1 source

Parliament was slower still. In the almost 40 years of the National Assembly, the number of women deputies never went above three until 1965, and the last Assembly, elected in 1973, had nine among 148 deputies. Domitila de Carvalho's career sits uneasily in both stories: a woman who opened a door at Coimbra, then used her seat to press for girls to be trained as mothers.1 source1 source

The school she ran is still a school. In 2020 the state classified the building of the former Liceu Feminino de Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho as a monument of public interest, noting that it keeps its original plan almost intact, with furniture, archives and its collections of scientific instruments.1 source1 source