, who was the mayor of Porto Alegre and had noticed her work on social and community issues, invited Furtado to run for a seat in the
Municipal Chamber of Porto Alegre in the 1972 election, on the
National Renewal Alliance (ARENA) ticket. She received 10,108 votes, making her the first woman elected to the municipal council. (Prior to Furtado's election, one other woman,
Julieta Battistioli, had taken over a seat that became vacant in the 1940s, but she was an alternative member and not directly elected.){{cite news |first=Jéssica Rebeca Weber |last=Weber |title=Conheça a história da primeira vereadora eleita em Porto Alegre Porto Alegre's council term was from 1973 until 1977, but Furtado resigned her municipal seat when she was elected to the
Legislative Assembly of Rio Grande do Sul. She was elected on 16 November 1974 as an ARENA candidate, the third woman to serve in the state legislature. and
Terezinha Irigaray, its first and second elected female deputies respectively, had left office before Furtado's inauguration, leaving her as the only woman in the Legislative Assembly during her first term. She served in the 44th legislature from 1975 to 1979, switched to the then newly formed (and now defunct)
Democratic Social Party (PDS), and won re-election to second and third terms in 1978 and 1982. Furtado was a vocal
women's rights activist in the legislature during the height of the
military dictatorship in Brazil. During the 1970s, she fought to remove a statute that required the state's female
civil servants to wear
skirts at work. An update to the civil service
dress code in the 1980s allowed women to wear pants. In 1977, Furtado released a book containing twelve
petitions and proposals aimed at improving
women's rights in Brazil, called
Cortando as Amarras (Cutting the Bonds), and presented it to the
Federal Senate. In it she called for retirement benefits for
housewives, abolition of
proof of virginity from the
Brazilian Civil Code's requirements for
marriage annulment, the right of women to work at night, and the creation of new housing and
dormitory options for female students at Brazilian universities. Some of Furtado's petitions were implemented slowly; for example, the virginity test for annulments was removed from Brazil's civil code in 2001. Furtado's fight to allow Brazilian women to work at night came after discussions with female
pharmacists in the state of
Bahia who wanted the option to work after dark; this led her to take the proposal to the national
Minister of Labor and Social Security, . In a 2008 interview, Furtado pointed out that she herself had not been allowed to work at night under the 1970s policies. Furtado became a nationally known figure for women's rights. She received multiple invitations from the then governor of
Paraná, , to speak with women's groups in his state. She became a regular speaker across Brazil, including talks in
Belém,
Manaus, and the banks of the
Rio Negro in the
Amazon basin. Furtado also travelled to the
United States to present a guest lecture in
Virginia on women's rights and family planning issues in her native Brazil. In August 1985, while serving her third term in the state legislature, Furtado left the
Democratic Social Party (PDS) and joined the
Democratic Labour Party (PDT) at the invitation of
Rio de Janeiro Governor Leonel Brizola. She sought re-election in 1986 under the PDT ticket, but did not win a fourth term. Despite not being re-elected, Furtado did not regret having switched political parties. ==Later life==