"They could hardly have chosen another name that would be more suitable for this award," said João Soares, moved, on March 8, at the ceremony to present the Maria Barroso Municipal Award, instituted by the Lagoa City Council, in partnership with the Vila Vita Group.
The prize, whose presentation marked the International Women's Day, will have a value of 30 thousand euros, being «the biggest national prize in this theme», in pecuniary terms, as the president Câmara Francisco Martins insisted on saying.
"The time has passed when this cause deserved only a symbolic award," added the mayor of Lagos, stressing that the award went to get the Maria Barroso's name because she “represents for us the example of a great woman”. “We cannot be hostages to symbolism”, stressed Francisco Martins. «This could never be a symbolic prize: because this is a bigger issue, and because the person we honor is even bigger…». This “is a tribute to an unavoidable figure of the ideals of equality; a woman of great sensitivity and humanist culture,” she said.
The main objective of this award, which will be biennial, is to distinguish women or men who, individually or at the head of institutions, carry out work in the fight for gender equality.
The initiative is one of the first measures of the municipal portfolio for Equality, Gender and Citizenship (IGC), created already during this term, and from which, until 2021, a series of initiatives will emerge that «aimed at breaking with the decorative role of the struggle for ideals of equality”.
«I make a mea culpa: maybe I woke up late to this theme of Gender Equality. But this is because I thought it was no longer the subject, because, for me, there is no such differentiation! I cannot understand that someone who is of another gender has more or less rights than me. For me, equality should be normality», added the mayor of Lagoa.
João Soares, who confessed that he was "touched" by the choice of his mother's name for this award, remembered her as "a woman who had an absolutely exceptional life" and who "was able, in this matter, and only by her discreet presence, give an immense lesson in this matter, because she was married to a man who had a very strong image and had a life that deserves praise from many titles, and never let herself be 'erased' like Mário Soares' wife», she said. Maria Barroso, added her son, "has always managed to exist on her own and has never strayed from the relationship of years and years with her husband and my father."
«It was a beautiful thing, which touches us all», added João Soares, referring to the Municipal Award, expressing thanks to the local authority and the Vila Vita Group, represented by its administrator Manuel Cabral.
The debate that followed, moderated by RTP journalist Luís Castro, brought to the Municipal Auditorium of Lagoa themes such as the women's strike, maternity leave, low birth rates, inequality in access to employment, the change of penal frameworks for crimes of domestic violence and inequality in poverty and in pay scales between the two genders.
Isabel Bartal Abílio, sociologist and Cantonal Deputy from Zurich, Switzerland, who spent her childhood and adolescence in Lagoa, as well as Ana Matos Fernandes, sociologist and rapper, better known as Capicua, and Fernando Anastácio, deputy in the Assembly of the Republic, were invited to debate, in a very open way, “Gender issues: fracturing or structuring?”.
The debate kept the audience interested and the topic motivated an invitation by journalist Luís Castro to the mayor of Lagoa to participate in the “Civil Society”, RTP's reference program, “so that these issues can be discussed not only on the day March 8th".
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