Legal Position of Women in Portugal: The Case of the Standing Committee on Legislation of the National Council of Portuguese Women (CNMP), 1914-1947

This chapter addresses the legal position of women in Portugal by examining the legislative reform projects of the National Council of Portuguese Women (CNMP, Conselho Nacional das Mulheres Portuguesas), a feminist federation established in Lisbon on 27 April 1914, thirteen years after its French counterpart, the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises (CNFF), which had come into being in Paris on 18 April 1901.The CNMP’s activities reached a peak during the 1920s, before the 1926 military coup. At that time it had approximately 1,500 members distributed among twenty affiliated associations. It published a journal, of which 158 issues appeared between its launch in November 1914 and its closure in May 1947, when the organization was abolished by the Salazar dictatorship.2 The main characteristic of the CNMP was the fact that it was the longest surviving of all Portuguese women’s organizations in the twentieth century.