Hello and welcome to The History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson,

The Past, brought to life by those who were there. This week, stories about influential women from the past

in partnership with the publication of this year's BBC 100 Women List. Among the women we feature,

those oppressed by 1970s Portuguese society, also the former Australian Prime Minister, Julia

Gillard on Misogyny in Politics, Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine, and the Nobel Prize-winning

scientist Katalin Kariko, whose work gave us the COVID vaccine.

It was 2020 and it was November 8th. And so then the call came and O'WOLC told me how good

the phase three result was and I just told my husband, oh, it worked. That's all come out later in the podcast.

But first, the three marias.

In May 1974, people gathered in the Portuguese capital, Lisbon,

to see whether three women would be sent to jail for writing a book.

Maria Teresa Orta, Maria Vejo da Costa, and Maria Isabel Bahenio wrote the book,

Novas Carta Portugueseas, which was banned after it was published, and they were put on trial.

The case became famous around the world.

Laura Jones has been listening to an archive interview with one of the three Marias.

It was time in Portugal for women to have a say about sexuality.

Women's sexuality was attributed to the husband, to the man with whom they lived.

If the man prefers such and such, so would she.

This was such a suffocating thing I used to talk about with women.

This is Maria Theresa Oter, a Portuguese feminist poet, journalist and activist. I was born in a country that wanted freedom, a terrible country, a country of police, a country of cruelty,

a country of imprisonment and torture. And I found myself at a very early age saying,

it's not possible. The authoritarian dictatorship of the Estadu Novo, or New State, was in power, with Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Silazar in charge.

...