Articles

Learning from Eva: Domestic Architecture, Media, and Gendered Modernity in Estado Novo Portugal

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Abstract

During Portugal’s Estado Novo, domestic life was publicly tied to family order, femininity, and national tradition. Yet the women’s magazine Eva (1925–1989), under Carolina Homem Christo’s long editorship, made domestic architecture a feature of women’s print culture. Through annual Christmas raffles in which readers could win a newly designed and furnished house, the magazine circulated plans, perspectives, interiors, furnishings, appliances, and descriptive texts that familiarized readers with domestic Modernism and models of everyday life. This article examines the Eva houses as architectural projects and media constructions, asking how Eva mediated Modernism to a female readership under dictatorship. Combining close reading, architectural analysis, and media history, it focuses on the initiative between 1933 and 1971, especially the 1957 house. It argues that these houses did not simply emancipate women but made alternative domestic arrangements culturally legible by translating modernist architecture into the language of comfort, practicality, taste, and household improvement.

Keywords: Women's magazines, Eva magazine, domesticity, architecture, consumer culture, gender, Modernism, Estado Novo, Portugal

How to Cite:

Almeida e Silva, J., (2026) “Learning from Eva: Domestic Architecture, Media, and Gendered Modernity in Estado Novo Portugal”, DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 13(1), 115–132. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.93129