Women in the Canning Industry

They were called conserveiras, arranjadoras, operarias. They made up ninety-five per cent of the workforce in the sardine factories of Setubal – tens of thousands of women whose hands fed the canning industry for over a century. They worked from sunrise to sunset, earned a third of what men earned, started as children, and buried their dead on Avenida Luisa Todi. This is the story of the women who built and sustained the canning industry – and who, when pushed to the limit, brought the city to a standstill.

The Female Workforce

Arranjadoras: The Core Operation

In the canning factories of Setubal, the division of labour was absolute. Men went to sea to fish and soldered the tin cans shut. Women did everything else – and everything else was the bulk of the work.

The women were classified by task, but the most numerous and most essential were the arranjadoras – literally, “the arrangers.” Their job was the full manual processing of the fish: beheading, gutting, washing, and packing the sardines into tins by hand. Each sardine had to be placed in a precise pattern – head to tail, layered in rows – at a speed that made the difference between earning enough to eat and going hungry, since payment was by the piece.

Other female roles in the factories included:

• Descabecadeiras – beheading and gutting the fish
• Embaladeiras – packing the processed sardines into tins
• Lavadeiras – washing fish and cleaning the work surfaces
• Estivadoras de lata – stacking and transporting the finished tins

By the early 20th century, women constituted approximately 95% of the factory workforce in Setubal’s canning sector. At the industry’s peak in the 1920s, this meant tens of thousands of women in a single city, concentrated along the waterfront in factories that stretched from the Fontainhas quarter to the eastern edge of town.

Girls at the Factory

Work in the canneries began young. Girls as young as nine years old entered the factories, performing auxiliary tasks – washing fish, sweeping floors, carrying baskets of sardines. By twelve or thirteen they were working alongside the adult women at the packing tables.

Child labour was not hidden or exceptional – it was structural. Families depended on the income, and factory owners depended on the cheap hands. There was no compulsory schooling that could have kept the girls out of the factories; education, for the daughters of conserveiras, was a luxury that few could afford and fewer still were encouraged to pursue.

Working Conditions

“De Sol a Sol”

The working day at the sardine factories followed the principle “De Sol a Sol” – from sunrise to sunset. In practice, this meant 14 to 16 hours of standing labour, with only two short breaks totalling roughly two hours.

But the real cruelty of the system lay in its unpredictability. The factories operated on a siren system: each cannery had its own distinctive siren, and when a catch of sardines arrived – whether at dawn or at three in the morning – the siren sounded, and the women had to report immediately. There was no fixed schedule, no advance notice, no right to refuse. A woman who failed to appear when her factory’s siren called risked losing her position entirely.

The conserveiras lived in a state of permanent readiness. Sleep was interrupted, domestic life arranged around the possibility that the siren might sound at any hour. Women who were nursing infants brought them to the factory or left them with neighbours. The factory did not accommodate motherhood; motherhood had to accommodate the factory.

Wages: The Gender Gap

The pay disparity between men and women in the canning industry was not subtle:

Women earned approximately 37% of men’s wages – and this for work that was no less demanding and often more physically punishing (standing for 14 hours, hands immersed in brine and fish oil, repetitive motions causing chronic injuries).

The justification offered by factory owners was the standard one of the era: women’s work was “lighter,” women had “lesser needs,” and in any case, a woman’s wage was “supplementary” to her husband’s income. In reality, many conserveiras were the sole or primary earners in their families – widows, women with absent or unemployed husbands, single mothers.

Health and the Body

The physical toll of the work was severe:

• Chronic hand injuries – cuts from fish bones, skin damage from prolonged contact with salt and oil
• Respiratory problems – from the constant inhalation of fish odours, smoke, and fumes from the soldering process
• Musculoskeletal damage – from standing all day, repetitive bending, carrying heavy baskets
• No medical care – neither sick leave nor any form of health provision existed for the workers

Women aged quickly in the canneries. Contemporary accounts describe conserveiras in their forties looking decades older, hands scarred and swollen, backs permanently bent.

The 1911 Strike and the Death of Mariana Torres

Background

By 1911, the canning workers of Setubal had endured decades of exploitation with minimal legal protection. Portugal was under the First Republic (proclaimed October 1910), and the new regime had brought hopes of reform – hopes that the factory owners had no intention of fulfilling.

In March 1911, the conserveiras of Setubal went on strike. Their demands were straightforward: better wages, shorter hours, an end to the siren system’s most arbitrary abuses. The strike was led overwhelmingly by women, and it was women who marched through the streets of Setubal demanding their rights.

The Fuzilamentos de Setubal

On March 13, 1911, the Republican Guard opened fire on striking workers on Avenida Luisa Todi – the central avenue of Setubal, named after the famous soprano. Among the dead was Mariana Torres, a 42-year-old conserveira and mother.

The shooting – known as the Fuzilamentos de Setubal – sent shockwaves through Portugal. A republic that had promised to defend the people’s rights was killing unarmed women in the street. The outrage was immediate and profound.

Aftermath: Portugal’s First General Strike

The killing of Mariana Torres and her fellow workers triggered a cascade of solidarity:

• On March 20, 1911, a general strike was declared – the first general strike in Portuguese history
• Workers across the country walked out in solidarity with the conserveiras of Setubal
• The women of the canneries refused to return to work even after male workers in other sectors had resumed – holding out until their core demands were at least partially addressed

The 1911 strike established a pattern that would define Setubal’s labour history for decades: women workers as the most determined, most militant, and most resilient element of the workforce. When the men returned, the women held the line.

Under the Estado Novo

The 1934 Strike Attempt

The establishment of the Estado Novo regime under Salazar (formally from 1933) brought the free labour movement to a halt. Independent unions were dissolved and replaced by state-controlled sindicatos nacionais – corporatist bodies designed to prevent strikes and channel worker demands into harmless bureaucratic procedures.

In January 1934, an attempt was made to organise a revolutionary general strike against the fascist regime. In Setubal, where the canning factories employed thousands of women, the potential for mobilisation was enormous. However, the PIDE (secret police) uncovered the conspiracy: 60 homemade bombs were found in the city on January 15, and the organisers were arrested on the night of January 17.

The strike proceeded in weakened form. Repressions were harsh: 696 arrests nationwide, mass trials, exile to the Tarrafal concentration camp in Cape Verde. In Setubal, workers suspected of participation faced dismissal and blacklisting – for women with families to feed, this was a sentence of destitution.

Corporatism and Controlled Unions

Under the Estado Novo, the conserveiras were stripped of their most important weapon: the right to organise freely. The sindicatos nacionais replaced genuine unions, and any attempt at independent organising was treated as subversive activity.

Yet the women of the canneries were never fully subdued. Throughout the dictatorship period, spontaneous protests erupted at factories – work slowdowns, brief stoppages, collective refusals to accept particularly exploitative piecework rates. Each such act carried the risk of arrest and dismissal, but the tradition of resistance, passed from mother to daughter on the factory floor, proved impossible to eradicate entirely.

PIDE Surveillance

The canning factories of Setubal were a constant focus of PIDE surveillance. Informers were embedded among the workers, and any sign of organised discontent was reported. The women worked under a double burden: exploited by the factory system and monitored by the state. In the political culture of the Red City, the conserveiras were both its backbone and its most vulnerable members.

Decline and Disappearance

The Factories Close

The decline of the canning industry in Setubal began in the 1970s and accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s. From approximately 132 factories at the peak in 1919, the number dwindled steadily. Depleted sardine stocks, foreign competition, outdated equipment, and Portugal’s entry into the European Community (1986) all contributed to the collapse.

By the mid-1990s, the last two canning factories in Setubal closed their doors. With them disappeared an entire world – not only an industry but a social system, a female culture of work, a web of skills passed down through generations.

The women who had spent their lives in the factories found themselves without work, without pensions (many had never been formally registered), and without the social recognition they deserved. They had built the industry that built the city, and the city had largely forgotten them.

The Human Cost

The end of the canning industry was particularly devastating for older conserveiras:

• Many had no formal employment records, making them ineligible for state pensions
• Skills honed over decades – the precise hand movements, the knowledge of fish – had no value in the new economy
• Entire neighbourhoods that had revolved around the factories lost their economic foundation
• The collective identity forged through shared labour and struggle dissolved as the factories emptied

Legacy and Memory

Museu do Trabalho Michel Giacometti

The most important institutional guardian of the conserveiras’ memory is the Museu do Trabalho Michel Giacometti, housed in the former Perienes canning factory. Opened in 1995 – the same year the last factories closed – the museum preserves the tools, documents, and oral histories of the canning era.

The permanent exhibition “Da Lota a Lata” (From the Auction Hall to the Can) reconstructs the entire production chain, with particular attention to the women’s roles. Authentic equipment, photographs, and testimony from former conserveiras bring the factory floor back to life.

In 1998, the museum received the Council of Europe Museum Prize – recognition not only of the quality of the museum itself but of the importance of the history it preserves.

Mariana Torres: From Victim to Symbol

For over a century, the memory of Mariana Torres – the conserveira killed on Avenida Luisa Todi in 1911 – was preserved primarily through oral tradition and labour movement commemorations. In 2016, the city of Setubal erected a statue of Mariana Torres, giving permanent physical form to the memory of the 1911 strike and the sacrifices of the conserveiras.

The statue stands as a reminder that the rights workers enjoy today – limited hours, minimum wages, the right to strike – were won at the cost of lives like hers.

Theatre and Cultural Memory

The story of the conserveiras has found new life in Portuguese theatre:

• “Mulheres de SAL” – a theatrical production exploring the lives, labour, and struggles of the women of the canning factories
• “A Casa de Emilia” (The House of Emilia) – a play that brings the women of the 20th-century canning industry to the stage, drawing on oral histories and archival research to reconstruct daily life in the factories

These productions serve as a form of cultural restitution – returning to public awareness a history that official narratives long overlooked or reduced to footnotes in the story of “the canning industry” as an abstract economic phenomenon. Behind the industry were women – named, specific, individual women – and their stories deserve to be told.

Historical Significance

The history of women in the canning industry of Setubal is significant on several levels:

1. Labour history – the conserveiras were among the earliest and most militant female industrial workers in Portugal, pioneering strike action and organised resistance decades before women’s suffrage
2. Gender history – the canning factories laid bare the structural inequality of industrial capitalism: women doing the majority of the work for a fraction of the pay, with no legal protections or political representation
3. Urban history – the conserveiras shaped the physical, social, and political character of Setubal, contributing to its identity as a Red City with deep traditions of resistance
4. National history – the 1911 strike and the Fuzilamentos de Setubal triggered Portugal’s first general strike, making the conserveiras protagonists in the broader story of Portuguese democracy

Key Dates

See Also

• The Canning Industry – the economic and industrial history of sardine canning
• Museu do Trabalho Michel Giacometti – museum preserving the memory of the conserveiras
• Estado Novo and Setubal – dictatorship, repression, and the suppression of free unions
• “Red City”: Political History of Setubal – the labour movement tradition the conserveiras helped create