Manuela Porto (24 April 1908 – 7 July 1950) was a Portuguese actor, writer, journalist, theatre critic, and translator, as well as a leading campaigner for women's rights and an opponent of the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal.

As a translator she introduced previously untranslated women writers to Portuguese readers, including Louisa May Alcott, Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf.

After graduation in 1931, with top marks and a prize, she was in two plays performed by the Grande Companhia Dramática Portuguesa (Great Portuguese Dramatic Company), before withdrawing from the theatre, complaining of "unscrupulous businessmen and ignorant artists".

Manuela Porto joined the Movement of National Antifascist Unity (Portuguese: Movimento de Unidade Nacional Antifascista or MUNAF), an organization that was created in 1943 but never legalized.

Porto was also a member of CEJAD, the Commission of Democratic Writers, Journalists and Artists (Comissão de Escritores, Jornalistas e Artistas Democráticos) and the Associação Feminina Portuguesa para a Paz (Portuguese Women's Association for Peace).

She was on the Central Commission of the Women's National Democratic Movement (Movimento Nacional Democrático Feminino), a legal organization founded after the presidential campaign of Norton de Matos in 1949.

Porto was particularly appreciated for her recitals, being able to deliver long poems from memory, such as Ode Marítima by Fernando Pessoa's heteronym Álvaro de Campos.

However, women were central to most of her literary work, whether as a translator of the female authors Louisa May Alcott, Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Hazel Goodwin Keeler, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, as a portrait writer on Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Parker, Judith (Judite) Navarro and Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, or in her own stories.

As Marques notes, the main characters in almost all her stories undergo considerable suffering: they are beaten by their fathers, cheated on and abandoned by the husband, experience the death of a child, or cannot follow the career they want.