Assinem assinem, que a alma não tem sexo! Petição colectiva e cidadania feminina no Portugal constitucional (1820-1910)

Abstract

Sign sign, the soul has no gender! Collective petitioning and women's citizenship in constitutional Portugal (1820-1910). Signing a collective petition was an important way of taking part in politics during Portugal's constitutional monarchy. Many women signed petitions, thereby exercising a political right. Women petitioners provoked public discussions that brought their political status into the open, advancing the possibility of feminine citizenship. During the 1850s and 1860s, women's use of the right to petition was visible and hotly debated, but during the 1867-70 political crisis women were stopped from taking part in petitions. Signatures of women reappeared only in the 1890s, hand-in-hand with the workers' movement, catholic and anticlerical mobilization, and republicanism. Meanwhile, those were times of crisis for liberalism, and the right to petition had already lost the favored, high profile status it once had within the bourgeois public sphere. Keywords: Portugal; collective petitioning; women's citizenship; constitutional monarchy.