Myrna Ivonne Wallace Fuentes. Most Scandalous Woman: Magda Portal and the Dream of Revolution in Peru.

Abstract

Most Scandalous Woman: Magda Portal and the Dream of Revolution in Peru, by Myrna Ivonne Wallace Fuentes, is an impressive and important addition to work on Latin American women and politics. Wallace Fuentes’s treatment of Portal is masterful. The author has given us an eloquent and exhaustively researched volume that blends a deep appreciation of her subject with a critical perspective. The result of this effort is an enhanced understanding of Portal, her writing and politics, and the currents of early twentieth-century Peruvian political life. Wallace Fuentes analyzes Portal as a revolutionary literary figure as well as a woman committed to political revolution in the hierarchical and oligarchic structure of Peruvian economic and political life. Wallace Fuentes also illuminates Portal’s heroic efforts to imagine and then construct a new Peruvian woman in personal and political terms. Wallace Fuentes writes with a deep appreciation of the profound political and personal costs of this effort for Portal. As a result we gain significant and unusual insight into the gendered politics that surrounded and constrained Portal’s efforts.