What was Portugal like before the 1974 Revolution? “We were always stuffy”

50 years of April 25th

For almost 50 years, Portugal was a country where TAP nurses, telephone operators and hostesses could not marry. On the beach, women were prohibited from showing their navels and on the train, no one was allowed to play cards. You couldn’t listen and read whatever you wanted or schedule meetings to discuss ideas contrary to the regime. Voting was not free, skirts could not be worn above the knee in high schools where classes were not mixed. Don’t even think about giving kisses in public.

For almost 50 years, Portugal was a country where TAP nurses, telephone operators and hostesses could not marry. On the beach, women were prohibited from showing their navels and on the train, no one was allowed to play cards. You couldn’t listen and read whatever you wanted or schedule meetings to discuss ideas contrary to the regime. Voting was not free, skirts could not be worn above the knee in high schools where classes were not mixed. Don’t even think about giving kisses in public.

“We were always stuffy”, guarantees António Costa Santos, the journalist who brought together these and other prohibitions in an edited book, the first time, 17 years ago, but which continues to attract attention, especially because today many of the prohibitions seem like just caricatured episodes.

However, António Costa Santos emphasizes that the “constant prohibitions and the climate of repression and oppression” create a “national mentality of vigilance in relation to others” as well as giving society space to even “invent prohibitions” as was once thought that you couldn’t drive in flip-flops or bare-chested, which is not true.

For the journalist, used to talking about prohibitions in sessions at schools, as happened at the Conde de Oeiras School Group, at the beginning of April, “freedom is fragile” and needs to be defended every day.