Maria Teresa Horta, one of the authors of New Portuguese Letters, titled The Three Marias in English, died on Feb. 4 in Lisbon, Portugal. The book, co-authored with Maria Isabel Barreno and Maria Velho da Costa, was immensely important to the international Women’s Liberation Movement as well as to broadening the scope of the 1974 Portuguese Revolution against fascism.

While The New York Times obituary does a good job of giving an overview of Horta’s life and importance, it states that The Three Marias “opened up a world of repressed female sexuality, infuriated the country’s ham-fisted dictatorship and led to their arrest and criminal prosecution on charges of indecency and abuse of freedom of the press.” Yes, it did all that. But the power of the book was also that it was explicitly revolutionary. It not only called for revolution, but it made clear that to change women’s lives revolution would have to be so deep as to transform human relationships, including sexuality. That is why their writing was not separated from taking up questions of sexuality, as can be seen in the following quote:

“I do not know who it is we have excluded, who it is we have killed. But we are sure of one thing at least: the leap has begun, with the smell of necessity, the voice of stone, the cutting edge of glass. We have set up the sacrificial altar, laid out the cup, the wine; we have looked at each other out of the corner of our eyes and asked: ‘Who is it we are sacrificing, who is it we are vanquishing, who is it we are using?’ But we have already killed, already excluded; we have sucked our victim’s blood, cleverly beaten him at his own game, and stripped him of his arms. And not just as an adventure, the goal of which we will be obliged to decide on later; so let us keep ourselves aloof from this feeling of being trapped in a nightmare, from the shudder of someone who awakens in terror after fighting in the dark in legitimate self-defense and says ‘What’s to be done with these corpses now?’ There are those who die out of good intentions and those who die out of necessity. I have already spoken of the seriousness of our undertaking, a fight for life, which in our time and our place is not considered legitimate, even in self-defense” (The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975), p. 63).

We who live in the time of genocide in Gaza and the rise of a rapist as a U.S. president can understand this book anew.

The Three Marias, as book and as three unique human beings, were very important to News and Letters Committees and Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanism. In the spring of 1977 in the aftermath of the Portuguese Revolution, Dunayevskaya wrote:

“Instead of keeping away from ‘feminist’ questions, the Old Left better learn to recognize new forces of revolution and new ways of emergence of those forces. Before the April 1974 overthrow of the fascist regime, undercurrents of revolt arose among women, from literature to actual class struggles.

“Thus New Portuguese Letters (published in the United States as The Three Marias, and by no means ‘just literature’—though great literature it is) posed questions of human relations far more profoundly than the Old Left had. The freedom of the ‘three Marias’ from jail was by no means due only to the overthrow of the Marcelo Caetano regime, but to the protests by the international Women’s Liberation Movement. The symbol the women’s movement, in agriculture especially, had chosen was Catarina Eufemia, assassinated by the National Guard during a strike for the eight-hour day” (Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Wayne State University Press, 1996), p. 130).

In Dunayevskaya’s notes when reading The Three Marias, she reproduces several paragraphs, including this one from page 116 that, again, reveals how deep and total revolution must become for women’s freedom:

“I realize, therefore, that it is not enough merely to consider the relations of production from the point of view of the fact that socially woman is a producer of children and a seller of her labour to man-the-boss…since bringing about a change in today’s economic and political system, which is founded on this domination, would not necessarily bring about the destruction of all the cultural crystallizations whereby the woman is made out to be an imbecile in the eyes of the law, a socially irresponsible creature, a castrated man, the wicked flesh, the sinner, Eve tempted by the serpent, a body without a soul, the virgin-mother, a witch, the devoted, self-sacrificing mother, the vampire that feeds on the man’s blood, the good fairy of the household, a stupid human being who is ashamed of her sexual desires, a whore and at the same time an angel, etc., etc.” (p. 116).

We mourn the passing of Maria Teresa Horta, who was the last living author of The Three Marias. As we face a rising fascism in the U.S. and worldwide, we will need many more like her. Not only as part of those who want to fight against our darkening world and all its “cultural crystallizations,” but as one who was working out not only what she opposed, but what she was for: new relationships where women and all people would be comprehended as full human beings.

–Terry Moon

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To find out more about the relationship of the authors of The Three Marias to Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanism, see the following:

From “A Post‑World War II View of Marx’s Humanism, 1843‑1883; Marxist Humanism, 1950s-1980s” (Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Today, pp. 316-317):

A look at another new force—Women’s Liberation—will show that by the 1970s it had developed from an idea to a movement. Though it was itself faced with contradictions of class, race and culture, it had a determining effect on the whole emancipatory process, whether this came from East or West, North or South.

A penetrating look into the incomplete emerging Portuguese Revolution appeared even before the mass revolt against fascism burst forth, in a book called The Three Marias, which gave notice of an opposition that the authorities thought they could silence by imprisoning its three authors. So powerful was the protest pouring forth from the Women’s Liberation Movement internationally, that not only did the authors gain their freedom, but an autonomous women’s movement became integral to the revolution itself. Despite this fact, Isabel do Carmo—who headed the revolutionary group PRP/BR (Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat/Revolutionary Brigades), which had raised the historically urgent question of apartidarismo (non‑partyism) for the first time within the Marxist movement—dismissed the autonomous Women’s Liberation Movement as purely petty‑bourgeois, that is to say, non‑revolutionary. But as the revolution faltered and she was again arrested, she rethought the whole struggle of both the revolution and its incompleteness, while the Women’s Liberationists continued their activity for her release. She concluded: “I’m beginning to think our whole struggle, the struggle of the Revolutionary People’s Party, was really a fight carried on by women.” That extreme declaration, when you are talking of the revolution as a whole—and being mindful that the Portuguese Revolution really started in Africa—is as wrong as her previous denial of the Women’s Liberation Movement; but the objectivity of that movement as a new revolutionary force and Reason is undeniable.

From the Raya Dunayevskaya Archives

Raya Dunayevskaya’s Notes on Maria Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Velho da Costa, The Three Marias (1975). Also included is a speech by Maria Barreno as printed in News & Letters (April, 1975).

Portugal, 1975. Notes by Dunayevskaya on The Three Marias and the Portuguese Revolution.

#14404 letter to Isabel do Carmo regarding Rosa Luxemburg and the contemporary Women’s Liberation Movement

#14435 A paragraph from a summary of the Detroit, Michigan, News And Letters Committees Celebration of international Women’s Day, March 8, 1981 by Olga Domanski: It is here we are forced to confront that the two pivotal questions of today (and tomorrow, because there can be no successful revolution without them) are: (1) the totality and the depth of the uprooting that is needed and (2) the dual rhythm of what Raya Dunayevskaya calls here both the “reorganizing of the so-called ‘objective’ material foundations,” and the “releasing of the so-called ‘subjective’ talents” of women and men who will then become whole. It is here that we are confronted with one of the actual revolutions of the past decade–-the Portuguese, and the contradictions between what an Isabel do Carmo and a Maria Barreno seem to represent: do Carmo, the revolutionary who is not a feminist but who has made a revolutionary contribution around the struggle for apartidarismo (non-partyism); and Barreno, the feminist writer, who created a whole new form of literature and who attributed her release from the fascist prison (where she was thrown with her two sister-authors of The Three Marias), not to the revolution, but to the international feminist movement. The point Dunayevskaya makes (and you will have to read it for yourselves, I would not presume to summarize it here)–-is that both, from two very different directions, faced the crucial question of what form of organization is needed to get freedom in our state-capitalist age.

#14758 a page on today’s Women’s Liberation Movement

#17092 letter to Maria Isabel Barreno, June 21, 1983

June 1974 News & Letters, p. 2. “WL Notes,” now renamed “WomenWorld Wide,” is a column of short notes in News & Letters on what was happening in the worldwide women’s movement. “WL Notes” made the first mention of The Three Marias in News & Letters:

The “Three Marias” of Lisbon, Portugal, were acquitted of having offended public morals with their book which attacks the repression of women in Portugal. Maria Horta, Maria Barreno and Maria da Costa said they would now start a women’s movement and try to legalize abortion.

July 1974 News & Letters, p. 2. “WL Notes”: Maria Theresa de la Horta, one of the “Three Marias,” led a demonstration of 15 women confronting Portugal’s military junta. In the second demonstration in a week, the women demanded a headquarters for the new women’s movement. The all-male junta has been slow to act on the women’s demands.

March 1975 News & Letters, p. 2. Deborah Morris article about Maria Barreno talk in Berkeley, Calif.

April 1975 News & Letters, p. 2. Excerpts from Maria Barreno’s talk in Berkeley, Calif.

May 1975 News & Letters, p. 8. “Our Life and Times” column: “Portugal: a revolution at the crossroads”

Oct. 1975 News & Letters, p. 8. “Our Life and Times” column: “Portugal”

Jan.-Feb. 1976 News & Letters, p. 5. “Two Worlds” column by Raya Dunayevskaya: “Will the Revolution in Portugal Advance?”

From summary of “Women’s creativity and liberation: nationally and internationally,” a speech by Raya Dunayevskaya to Wayne State University Women’s Liberation, March 7, 1975:

As against that non-understanding of what the Dialectics of Liberation means, let us look at Maria Barreno, one of the Three Marias, who wrote New Portuguese Letters. She gave a talk in the U.S. and made three main points: 1) The greatness of collectivity. It’s the fact that three women in fascist Portugal just decided to sit down and talk together about a 17th century nun and what life was like today in Portugal. The first collectivity was a form of individual development and gave them strength.

2) Sexuality is political. Barreno said that what was worse than even the prison was the liberals coming to interview them and asking, “Is it just a feminist book or is it political?” She said unless politics was a new way of relationships, a new culture, and a new way of doing things, there was no point to it. Sexuality was a political question and the worst thing was that it was hidden.

3) The third thing was finding and associating Marxism with feminism. Barreno said she was for feminism because it was the only hope she had for changing this society. The Trotskyists, who had given her a platform, were very unhappy with the answer she gave when they said it was the revolution in Portugal that freed the Three Marias from prison. She said she was glad there was the revolution, but what freed them was the international movement of women who sent mass protests from throughout the world.

It is because you have to have that sort of feeling for creativity that comes out of liberation, for the new continent of thought that came from Marx, for knowing that the “leadership” these women were talking about doesn’t mean one more vanguard party. They mean the unity of theory and practice. If you get the philosophy of liberation as that unity of theory and practice, then you won’t be so worried about the philosopher—is he man or is she woman? You will pay attention to what is the philosophy—and whether that really means to change all the relations.

At this stage, when we are functioning under the whip of the counter-revolution, whether in Boston or right here, it is important to see that we do not have just “mindless” activity, or even great activity—but activity together with a philosophy of liberation.

I want to end with a quote from my Philosophy and Revolution…

“Ours is the age that can meet the challenge of the times when we work out so new a relationship of theory to practice that the proof of the unity is in the Subject’s own self-development. Philosophy and revolution will first then liberate the innate talents of men and women who will become whole. Whether or not we recognize that this is the task that history has ‘assigned’ to our epoch, it is the task that remains to be done.”