| Summary: | The present article focuses on the role of Francisca de Assis Martins Wood at the helm of a periodical endowed with a distinctively progressive ethos, A Voz Feminina [The Female Voice] subsequently rebranded O Progresso [Progress]. It argues that ahead in the famous all-male 1871 Casino Lectures Wood’s editorials marked a turning-point in terms of a modern conceptualisation of politics and religion from a gendered perspective. In her self-appointed mission to foster debate on religious, political and ethical questions, Wood deployed a variety of tactics. The article examines one recurrent discursive strategy: the publication of open letters, often in the form of petitions, addressed to men in positions of authority. After entreating the local authorities in Lisbon to deal with widespread cruelty to animals, Wood broadened her scope to more inflammatory issues: female education and the vote. Her public interventions, addressed to figureheads endowed with transnational significance, Pope Pius IX and the Spanish Republican leader Emilio Castelar, must be understood as political activism at a time when women’s voices were not easily heard in the public sphere.
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