Ruth Cardoso was a distinguished anthropologist who, as the wife of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, re-shaped the Brazilian Government’s approach to social policies between 1995 and 2003.

She adopted the customary role for a First Lady of sponsoring good works, but with a significant difference: Dona Ruth, as she was respectfully known, was a formidable public figure in her own right, and she invested the role with an unprecedented degree of both intellectual rigour and professional competence. Her principal achievement was Community Solidarity, an organisation that brought together many disparate public and private initiatives, in areas such as literacy, youth training and nutrition. Its aim was to narrow the yawning gap between the privileged and the poor in one of the most unequal countries in the world.

Cardoso’s work had a profound effect on the formulation of social policy in Brazil and provided the inspiration for the Bolsa Família programme of family income support adopted by Cardoso’s successor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It has been credited with lifting millions of people out of poverty by providing them with financial incentives to take care of their children and send them to school. President da Silva acknowledged, while declaring three days of official mourning, that Ruth Cardoso had planted the seeds that bore fruit during his Government.

After completing her PhD in anthropology at São Paulo University, Ruth Cardoso pursued her studies at Columbia University in New York on a Fulbright scholarship. She met Fernando Henrique, a sociologist, while they were both students in São Paulo in 1948, and they were married four years later. Their marriage was to last 56 years.

The military coup of 1964, which overthrew the populist Government of President João Goulart, cut short the Cardosos’ academic careers, and the couple lived in exile for a number of years, in Chile, France, the US and Britain, where they both secured a succession of university posts. After they returned to Brazil, they helped to found, and she later headed, the Cebrap research institute (Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning), which remains a leading social science research establishment. While Ruth continued her academic work, her husband went into politics, serving as Foreign Minister and Finance Minister before being elected President, as the candidate of the Social Democratic Party (PSDB), in 1995. After he left office, she transformed the Community Solidarity programme into an NGO called Comunitas.

Ruth Cardoso was the author of a number of influential articles and book chapters on urban anthropology, social movements, immigration, political participation and violence. She was one of the pioneers of serious academic study of Brazilian cities’ notorious shantytowns, known as favelas. She was an associate member of the Centre of Latin American Studies at Cambridge, while her husband was visiting professor there in 1976-77.

Ruth and Fernando Henrique Cardoso had two daughters and a son, all of whom survive her.

Ruth Vilaça Corrêa Leite Cardoso, anthropologist, author and social reformer, was born on September 19, 1930. She died of a heart attack on June 24, 2008, aged 77