This detailed study of the election, presidencies and impeachment of Brazil's Dilma Rousseff (2011–16) is an important contribution to the growing literature on the gendered impacts of women's occupancy of the highest political executive positions. It also adds to the more recent literature relating to violence against women in politics. The book is in three main parts, analysing Rousseff's ascent to the presidency, the actions that she took whilst in the presidency in terms of gendered-balanced cabinet appointments and gender-related public policies, and her fall from office, through a bitter and contentious impeachment process. The study is constructed around the notion of women's empowerment, that is to say, how she as a female chief executive implicitly and explicitly improved women's status and access to political resources and voice. The disempowerment part of the title refers to how the political system responded to Brazil's first female president, and how the misogyny evident throughout this part of her political career intensified in the impeachment process of 2016, as the male political establishment sought to put her back in her place, often deploying the crudest of sexist slurs. The subsequent right-wing caretaker government of her vice-president, Michel Temer, and the subsequent far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro intensified this process of backlash and disempowerment of women in executive positions and policymaking, at least within the federal government.

One of the strengths of this book is the remarkable number of interviews (over 150) on which it draws, conducted over a ten-year period, from the point at which Rousseff's name was first being mooted as a possible successor to the Workers’ Party's popular and charismatic President Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, through her selection, two election campaigns, her first government, impeachment in the second, through to the Temer and Bolsonaro governments. Paired comparison with the Lula presidencies and with the successor governments is usefully employed as a means of giving some perspective on the Rousseff presidencies and the yardsticks against which they can be measured, in this case specifically from the perspective of promoting gender equality. The book does not attempt any overall assessment of her time in office, whether of her political or economic management skills, and resists calling her 2016 ouster a coup. Nonetheless, retrospective analysis of her governments, especially in the light of revelations about judicial politicisation in the anti-corruption ‘Car Wash’ investigations and in attempts to remove Lula from political circulation, both of which formed the backdrop to her removal from the presidency, may find history being somewhat kinder to her. The book does an excellent job of pulling the thread of gender out of the tangle of other simultaneous processes, such as coalition politics and the breakdown of a centrist political consensus that had endured for two decades since the return to democracy in the mid-1980s.

The study shows clearly the extent to which Rousseff was committed to promoting women into visible positions in public office, appointing a higher percentage to her cabinets than any previous president, even in the face of countervailing pressures to satisfy factions within her party and within the governing coalition. On the public policy side, evaluation is more complex, given that her government was a continuation of the Lula administrations. It is also harder to specify what difference presidential initiative per se can make. The authors conclude that she did prioritise services, such as pre- and post-natal care, housing, daycare, and extended conditional cash transfer benefits for children, that benefited the poorest women in Brazilian society. Her relative detachment from the feminist movement and feminists in her own party left them somewhat dissatisfied with her lack of support for their agenda, and her insistence of building expensive ‘one-stop-shops’ for victims of domestic violence in each state capital was much criticised. However, her commitment on this issue was undeniable, and the passage of the anti-femicide law in 2015, which the book does not mention, depended on her backing, even as her political capital was ebbing away.

The collaboration of these two authors, one with expertise in gender in Brazil's legislative and electoral political processes, the other with comparative expertise in analysing how gender relations shape, and are reshaped by, the gradual growth in female elected heads of government, is very effective. The empirically rich case study combines with observations from the wider and much more extensive literature on gender and political representation to draw out what is significant about Dilma Rousseff's experience.

Notable is the chapter on the use of language and symbolic representation. Whilst she did not regard herself as a feminist, Rousseff did insist on being called ‘presidenta’, a perfectly grammatical form in Portuguese but one that was almost universally rejected by the press and mocked by her opponents. One journalist said the word was ‘a little ugly, not natural’, which is exactly how many treated her as a female president. The authors took the trouble to survey journalists and usage in print media, demonstrating that Spanish language outlets had no problem in using this term. This tussle over naming women as political agents is reminiscent of the way in which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women in Latin America tried to assert their right to vote as ‘chilenos’ or ‘brasileiros’, as specified in national constitutions, only to be informed that the masculine plural form did not, in fact, include them. Political violence against women can take the form of failing to name women as political agents or forcing them to name and frame themselves as agents in stereotypical ways – Dilma was obliged to present herself as ‘mother’ of the nation in her first election campaign, before pivoting to a ‘warrior’ image, referring to the political activism of her youth, in her re-election campaign. Since her removal from office, she has refused to be silenced and her experience, as analysed in this carefully argued and evidenced analysis, will inform and ground future studies of the difference that a female president can make, in Latin America and further afield.