The literary journalism of Irene Lisboa: The violent everyday life of women and children under the Portuguese Estado Novo dictatorship

Irene Lisboa (1892–1958) is one of the most significant female thinkers and writers of the early decades of Portuguese Fascism. This article offers a pioneering examination that positions her work within the field of literary journalism, journalism written with literary techniques in a narrative mode. To be a writer, poet, pedagogue, literary journalist, and woman during the consolidation of Europe’s longest dictatorship (1933–1974) was to engage in a constant struggle with the regime. Writing in the first person or through the voices of real individuals, Lisboa developed a discourse of denunciation that emerged from her immersive positioning in the spaces she described. Her crónicas – a form of literary journalism native to Portuguese Spanish – present a fragmentary and experimental style with which Lisboa expressed her revolt while simultaneously evading censorship. Her primary concern was to represent the everyday realities of anonymous individuals from both Lisbon and rural Portugal, focusing particularly on the violent experiences of women and children in stark contrast to the regime’s narrative of a modern, cosmopolitan nation.