What factors account for social change is in new democracies? Democratic transitions are unique moments when societies can rethink the power and social relations within them. We ask whether a history of women’s activism and political mobilization during authoritarian periods can help the creation of more egalitarian gender norms in pos nascent democracies. Empirically, we draw upon the case of Portugal, which lived through the longest dictatorship in Western Europe. We leverage an original dataset of women’s protests during the authoritarian period, collected from archival sources, which we merge with other historical sources of data. Equipped with these data, we assess whether municipalities with more womens’ activism during the dictatorship had more egalitarian gender norms following the democratic transition in the late 1970s. Concretely, we draw upon outcomes such as the gender pay gap, the number of women mayors, and traditional measures of gender norms, e.g. fertility and marriage/divorce rates. Our findings speak to three bodies of literature. First, they add to the literature on the origin of democratic norms in post-authoritarian countries. Second, they improve our understanding of the outcomes of women’s protests. Finally, they speak to a growing literature on the long-term effects of protest actions.