Helena Neves was an active Portuguese communist and feminist and an opponent of the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, being imprisoned on three occasions.
Her paternal grandfather was an anarchist and an atheist but her father was a supporter of António de Oliveira Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, and an employee of the Fundação Nacional para Alegria no Trabalho (Foundation for Joy at Work), a state-sponsored body, and made her mother stop being a primary school teacher in order to assume what the state then considered to be her natural role of "wife and mother".
[1][2][3][4] Neves, along with Helena Pato and others, founded the Movimento Democrático de Mulheres (Democratic Women's Movement - MDM) in 1969.
In October of the same year, she was imprisoned in Caxias prison near Lisbon by the PIDE, after she had been nominated by the Portuguese Democratic Movement (MDP) as a candidate for parliamentary deputy for Santarém.
After this arrest she was prevented from teaching for "not guaranteeing State Security" and then started a journalistic career at the daily Diário de Lisboa, after a brief stint at a newspaper in Santarém before it was closed down by the PIDE.
After editorial disagreements she moved to another paper, the Jornal República, to edit a supplement called Presença da Mulher (Presence of Women).
In 1972 she wrote the text for Raízes da Nossa Força, a book of photographs by Alfredo Cunha about children from slums in the Lisbon region.
Neves was principal editor until 1980, when she was appointed deputy director, a position held until 1984, assuming the direction of the magazine, from 1984 to 1991, after the death Maria Lamas.
Her studies mainly focused on the theme of gender and on women's movements and on the work of the communist mathematician and statistician Bento de Jesus Caraça.