This paper aims to present the main lines of the development of the girls’ secondary education in Portugal, from the XVIII to the XX century, identifying historical periods in this development that illustrate the passage, sometimes slow, from a domestic (or institutional) education to accomplish a ‘women’s destiny’ to girls’ schooling, initially compromised to this gender destiny, but later confronting possibilities for neutralizing it with school diplomas and education. It is only in the second part of the XX century that girls’ secondary education in terms of equal rights, mainly after the 1970s, becomes more materialized. In many of these periods the more open sectors were claiming for changes in the basis of the European and North America standards. Formal secondary education for girls only emerged at the end of the XIX century, when the state created the first lyceum (liceu) for girls. The specific role attributed to women in Portuguese society, i. e. becoming attentive wives and mothers, conditioned the process of education, with implications for ‘specialized’ subjects introduced in girls schools' curriculum. There was an explicit ideology of gender differentiation and an ideology of women's domesticity. Further, education aimed to maintain a sexual division of labour in the sense that boys would be prepared to perceive the public sphere of work and life as their domain; and girls were required to channel their energies mainly into the home, and to become 'home based' in a highly stratified monarchist society, unquestioned in its social ranking. Different perspectives were sustained on working-class girls' education mainly by socialists and feminists, in the end of XIX and first decades of the XX century. Ana Osório, a remarkable feminist, stressed that Portuguese life was worse than in other countries, with an atmosphere of “moral asphyxia” and the prejudices in girls’ convent education, contributing to a situation as if women were in a prison. Some of the feminist claims were heard in the Republic that lasted only until 1926, followed by a dictatorship regime ended in 1974.