2024 in review: A win for women – and the Feast

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Born on Madeira on Sept. 29, 1936, Maria “Lucy” Peixoto waited a long time to become a member of the club that runs New Bedford’s renowned Portuguese feast. 

All of her long adult life.

2024 in Review

But 2024 was a good year for the now 88-year-old grandmother. It was the year her dream came true of finally becoming a festeira – a female volunteer eligible to be recognized as a member of the heretofore all men’s club that runs the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time,” Lucy told a Madeiran film crew on hand for the landmark event last August. “Why couldn’t I do this?” she asked. 

The daughter of Manuel Coutinho, one of the Feast’s four founders in 1915, Lucy explained that her father would be surprised how big the festival has grown -– the four-day celebration of food, family, wine, and devotion is said to be the largest Portuguese religious feast in the world.

“I felt I had to be part of it, like my brothers. And especially serving with my three granddaughters, my daughter-in-law and my adopted granddaughter,” she said during an interview in “The First Maderian Festeiras,” a 22-minute video produced by the Hit the Road Madeira production company.

Peixoto family members this year came from as far away as Georgia to take part in the Feast. In addition to Lucy, there were her two sons, three granddaughters, the adopted granddaughter and the wife of one of her sons, all of them becoming festeiras for the first time. 

Because of a historic rule limiting feast members to patriarchal lineage, initially Lucy’s two sons couldn’t even be club members until 1998, and now in 2024, she herself finally could serve as an official member. No longer was she relegated to just cleaning the booths, stringing the plastic flowers, cutting the garland greens, and serving the Madeiran wine.  

In honor of the first year of women feast members, the Feast sponsored a first-ever raising of the Madeiran flag and a singing of the island archipelago’s national anthem (Madeira is an autonomous region of Portugal).

Lucy helped with the raising of the flag, and after the crowd sang the anthem, on her own the 87-year-old walked all the way down Earle Street and under the garlanded gateway to the Feast, a festeira for the first time. Later that month, she was the first-ever festeira elected to the club though some 30 other women joined her that day.

Even though Lucy Peixoto had worked for the Feast all her life, her recognition this year was only made possible by a concerted effort in 2024 to convince Clube Madereinse S. S. Sacramento to finally allow women to become full members.

The successful argument, it should be emphasized, was accompanied by a threat of a lawsuit by seven women of Madeiran heritage. It’s not that many of the club’s men were not in favor of the women joining, but an organizational bylaw prohibited women from membership until 75% of the members on hand had voted in favor. It proved a bar too high to hurdle for many decades into the feminist movement.

A full 50% of the men at an October 2023 meeting had voted against allowing women, something not lost on Nicole Peixoto, Lucy’s granddaughter.

“The vote was a big deal and the fact that 50% of the club can sit there and say you’re not worthy is really heartbreaking,” said Nicole in “The First Festeiras.” 

The negative vote, however, had an upside: It galvanized the women to play hard ball. And the club members, perhaps realizing how much money the organization could lose, came around.

Tara George, a local attorney and Madeiran-American woman, was one of the seven who petitioned the club by way of the promise to take legal action if the prohibition against them was not repealed. Other Massachusetts lawsuits against private clubs that run big events open to the public at large, had been decided in favor of equal access to membership.

A longtime Feast volunteer herself, George is the adopted granddaughter Peixoto referred to. She said that when Peixoto and the other first-time festeiras walked under that feast gate, the crowd, especially the women who were waiting, went wild.

“Under the arch when we passed, everyone was screaming,” she said.

Since the prohibition ended, there hasn’t been a ripple of trouble as the women took their places. Part of that might be how much the women brought to the table.This year’s Feast group was one of the smallest annual groups that stages the festival, and they needed all the help they could get.

“Once the women joined, we really stepped up, and just did everything that needed to be done,” said George.

In fact, the small group on this year’s committee – just 25 men with only 15 active — swelled to 65 when the women were allowed to join. The women had quickly become the majority of this year’s committee.

A similar phenomenon has happened at the club meetings where the meetings have grown with both last year’s women members and the coming year’s. After a woman spends a year as a festeira, or a man spends a year as a festeiro, they are eligible to apply for club membership. After a vote of the club, the overwhelming majority of women who served as festeiras this year became club members.

Former City Councilor Jane Gonsalves, who will be a festeira for the coming year and one of the organizers of the lawsuit threat, said she believes women are really good at things like logistics and planning.

And they evidently take it seriously.

“I approach it like a job,” said Gonsalves, who has a background in economics, insurance and government. “I made a commitment to do this so I’m going to learn about how the feast runs as much as I can.”

In fact, the women festeiras in 2024 were so successful that two of them were subsequently elected to the club’s governing board. George was elected recording secretary, defeating an incumbent man, and Allison Paiva was elected assistant dues collector. She also defeated a man for the open seat.

The fact that two women won seats on the board speaks volumes,” said George. She believes there was no deep-seated animus against the women among most men in the club.

George said that she has become even more active in helping the club since she became a member. One of the things she did this year to help out was to use her skills as a lawyer to help out with entertainment contracts. “It was one of the best experiences of my life,” she said. 

The club is really a year-round charitable organization that supports a variety of local causes including giving out $30,000 in college scholarships last year. This past week, George found herself helping out with the annual Christmas party for the children of club members.

George noted that her grandmother and great aunt could never be club members. Similarly, Gonsalves never got to serve with her late father, or her niece who died young, all because of the prohibition against women. 

But in 2024, the success of this first wave of festeiras has set a positive tone for the future.

An only child from a Madeiran family, George noted that the feast buddies that she has worked with for 25 years have become a big part of her life. 

“I have this whole huge family because of my involvement,” she said.

With the talent and hard work of women like George, Gonsalves and the Peixotos, it seems like the next generation of the feast will be better than ever.

Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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