Francine Benoît

Francine Benoît (18941990) was a musician, teacher, composer, conductor, and music critic. She played an active role in Portuguese feminist organizations and was an opponent of the Estado Novo dictatorship, which ruled between 1933 and 1974. Born in France, she lived most of her life in Portugal and became a naturalised Portuguese citizen in 1929. Early life Francine Germaine Van Gool Benoît was born in Périgueux in the Dordogne department of France on 30 July 1894, to a Belgian mother and a French father. Her father was an engineer and had already taken his family to Algeria, Belgium, Switzerland and Spain because of his work, when the family arrived in Portugal in 1906. They settled in Setúbal where her father had a job assembling machines for a fish-canning factory. She was first taught the piano by her mother, and also had private lessons, before studying the piano at the Academia de Amadores de Música in Lisbon. She later graduated with distinction in piano and harmony from the National Conservatory of Lisbon, where she was a student of Alexandre Rey Colaço. Benoît then returned to France to study composition with Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum de Paris between 1917 and 1918.

Choirs and teaching Back in Portugal, she was invited by Maria Rey Colaço to conduct the Choral Society of Lisbon (Canto Coral de Lisboa). This was the first of many choral groups that Benoît conducted. To support her mother and herself after her father's death in 1914, she also worked as a pianist at Lisbon's Olympia cinema, accompanying silent films. From 1920 to 1931, she taught at the Escola Oficina n.º1 in Lisbon. This school followed a different approach to teaching that aimed at the multidisciplinary preparation of students and the development of their critical spirit. The principal was César Porto. His daughter Manuela Porto, who also became a leading feminist, attended this school when Benoît was teaching there.

Later activism Benoît joined the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), which was founded in 1945 as an umbrella organization for opponents to the Estado Novo, but was closed down in 1948, probably because it became dominated by the Communist Party. In 1948, she worked with the new Grupo Dramático Lisbonense (Lisbon Drama Group), an amateur group run by Manuela Porto that was largely made up of members of a MUD choir that had been formed by Fernando Lopes-Graça in 1945. In the late 1960s, she joined the Women's Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático de Mulheres – MDM), which was founded in 1968 to protest against the ongoing wars in Portugal's colonies but subsequently developed into an organization in defence of women's rights, campaigning for equal pay for the same job, access for women to all professions, extending maternity leave, provision of free maternity care in hospitals and, later, campaigning for the decriminalisation of abortion. At MDM's First Congress in 1970, Benoît was elected to the National Council.

Benoît died on 27 January 1990. She was posthumously awarded the Portuguese Order of Liberty. Her name has been given to several streets and squares in Portugal. Her literary and musical estate was divided between the National Library of Portugal, the Academia dos Amadores de Música, and the Department of Musical Sciences, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, NOVA University Lisbon.