Although uncommon, female presidencies worldwide remain a remarkable and underresearched phenomenon. Women comprised just 6% of popularly elected presidencies in 2020. Women are even less likely to obtain power in pure presidentialist systems—that is, where presidents wield the greatest amount of constitutional power (Farida Jalalzai, Shattered, Cracked or Firmly Intact?: Women and the Executive Glass Ceiling Worldwide, 2013). Finally, female presidents earn lower approval ratings than their male counterparts (Ryan E. Carlin, Miguel Carreras, and Gregory J. Love, “Presidents’ Sex and Popularity: Baselines, Dynamics and Policy Performance,” British Journal of Political Science 50: 1359–79, 2020), and they are punished more harshly for corruption and scandals (Catherine Reyes-Housholder, “A Theory of Gender’s Role on Presidential Approval Ratings in Corrupt Times,” Political Research Quarterly 73[3]: 540–55, 2020).

For all these reasons, President Dilma Rousseff’s victories in Brazil in 2010 and 2014 and her impeachment in 2016 have attracted enormous media attention as well as growing interest among scholars. In Women’s Empowerment and Disempowerment in Brazil: The Rise and Fall of President Dilma Rousseff, Pedro dos Santos and Farida Jalalzai provide the most definitive, empirically rich, and thought-provoking analysis to date of gender’s role throughout Rousseff’s campaigns, administrations, and impeachment. Female presidential victories may inspire optimism about women’s political status, but this book reveals the vicissitudes of women’s empowerment in Brazil. The authors argue that gender—stereotypes about women in politics, maternalism, and misogyny—imbued Rousseff’s unlikely emergence, decision-making, and dramatic downfall.

The authors’ original fieldwork data—most notably, 152 personal interviews conducted in 2010, 2012, 2016, 2017, and 2018—impressively span the entire temporal period of Rousseff’s administrations. The authors complement these rigorously documented data sources with participant observations, media archives, select government documents, and some publicly available survey data. Their fieldwork enables thick description of campaign events and presidential decision-making as well as select jewels of discourse analysis.

Chapter 1 describes the emergence of Rousseff as President Luiz Inácio da Silva’s top cabinet minister. Scholars generally agree that Lula’s unwavering support for Rousseff’s presidential bid combined with his enormous popularity largely drove Rousseff’s first victory. The central mystery of Rousseff’s 2010 election therefore remains in the motivations behind Lula’s decision to select her rather than a male Workers’ Party (PT) insider to continue his legacy. Chapter 1 reveals some clues to this puzzle: the mensalão scandal removed potential Lula successors and badly stained the party’s reputation as an anti-corruption force. Not only did Chief of Staff Rousseff prove her worth as a highly effective, trustworthy technocrat, but the minister also possessed a squeaky-clean record on corruption. Many in the PT embraced the idea of offering Brazil its first female president to succeed the country’s first working-class president.

Chapter 2 analyzes the role of gender throughout the sequence of events that culminated in Rousseff’s impeachment trial and removal. The chapter draws on Kate Manne’s (2018) work and research on violence against women in politics to locate misogyny not only among anti-PT elites (misogynist rhetoric on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies) but also among members of the Brazilian public (misogynist attacks on social media and a symbolically violent car decal). The authors avoid simplistic conclusions that misogyny caused Rousseff’s downfall because it is unreasonable to imagine a counterfactual world without misogyny. The authors instead identify and unpack compelling examples of how misogyny—a desire to “put women in their place”—imbued her impeachment process.

Chapters 3 and 4 turn to Rousseff’s variable successes in empowering women through her cabinet appointments, legislative decision-making, and symbolic discourse. Chapter 3 examines Rousseff’s cabinet not only vis-à-vis Lula’s—the most intuitive comparator—but also in relation to those of Rousseff’s conservative successors: Presidents Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro. The exploration of female appointments across these presidencies reminds readers that women’s representational gains in cabinets can be fragile and subject to reversals, particularly because Latin American presidents wield so much unilateral power over their cabinets. Chapter 4 then tells the story of the opportunities and obstacles Rousseff faced in legislating on behalf of women. The authors turn to Htun and Weldon’s (2018) typology, which considers whether legislation challenges religious doctrine to classify policies promoting women’s rights. This smart move reveals that Rousseff did not promote any policies that challenged religious doctrine. Instead, she stuck to nondoctrinal pro-women policies (The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women’s Rights Around the World, 2018).

Chapters 3 and 4’s fine-grained examination provides mixed evidence that Rousseff used her presidential powers to promote pro-women change to a greater degree than her copartisan male predecessor Lula. For example, she appointed more women to her cabinets, but it was Lula who created the women’s ministry (SPM). Moreover, Lula’s trademark policies, such as the Bolsa Família—which directly benefited mothers (but is not widely considered feminist)—proved to be far more successful than some of Rousseff’s signature pro-women policies, such as the Casa da Mulher Brasileira (pp. 99–101) and the Rede Cegonha (pp. 104–107). Examining reasons for her policy failures, the chapter suggests that Rousseff’s lack of close ties to and communication with feminists may have affected her capacity to design effective policies promoting gender equality.

One might expect female presidents to enjoy better relations with organized groups of women than male presidents, but a central theme of this book remains Rousseff’s complicated relationship with feminists, who often viewed her campaign and presidencies as frustrated outsiders. Chapter 1 shows that although the prospect of a first-time presidenta encouraged feminists, some disapproved of her candidacy’s maternalist framing; some were disappointed with her relatively conservative stance on reproductive rights. Feminists praised her appointments of female ministers (as discussed in chapter 3), but then resisted some of her initiatives targeting women (chapter 4). And yet, chapters 2 and 5 draw out one of the key ironies of Rousseff’s terms in office: it is not her election but the misogynistic impeachment trial that ends up uniting many feminists.

Chapter 5 closes with discussion of the symbolic consequences of Rousseff’s presidency. Conceptualizing and measuring presidents’ symbolic power is difficult, but here. the authors provide a particularly compelling discursive analysis of the political uses of—and resistances to—the term presidenta. Rousseff and her surrogates sought to empower women and energize feminists during her reelection campaign by using the term presidenta rather than presidente. The authors point out that although the use of presidenta is grammatically legitimate, mainstream media employed presidente. One journalist’s comment that presidente just “sounded better” (p. 119) suggests masculinist assumptions behind the media’s resistance. The chapter also addresses a burning question for presidency and gender scholars: can female presidencies viewed as “failures” still symbolically empower women? The authors, again drawing on data from personal interviews, conclude that in the case of Rousseff, the answer is yes (p. 134).

To sum up, dos Santos and Jalalzai provide a fascinating, comprehensive account of gender’s role in the rise and fall of one of the most important female presidencies in the world. This accessible book contributes to politics and gender research, which traditionally has focused on issues of representation and women in legislative politics. Presidents, particularly those in Latin America, are enormously powerful agents whose duties are defined less by their ability to represent constituents than by their ability to effectively exercise appointment and legislative and symbolic power. Consequently, rather than focusing exclusively on issues of representation, the authors smartly have moved to themes of empowerment and disempowerment. Its astute, well-contextualized observations of the deep complexities and contradictions of the Rousseff presidencies shine new light on an understudied area of research.