Eva Peron

Topics: Argentine actors, Argentine politicians, Argentine Roman Catholics, Spouses of the Presidents of Argentina

Maria Eva Duarte de Peron was a prominent Argentine political leader. The second wife of President Juan Domingo Peron (18951974), she served as the First Lady of Argentina from 1946 until her death in 1952, the year in which she became the Spiritual Leader of the Nation. She is often referred to as simply Eva Peron, or by the affectionate Spanish language diminutive Evita, which literally translates into English as "Little Eva".

Born out of wedlock in rural Argentina in 1919, at age 15 Eva Duarte made her way to the nation's capital of Buenos Aires where she pursued a career as a stage, radio, and film actress. Eva met Colonel Juan Peron in 1944 at a charity event in Buenos Aires. The two were married by the following year. In 1946 Juan Peron was elected President of Argentina, making Eva Peron First Lady of the nation. Over the course of the next six years, she became powerful within the Pro-Peronist trade unions, essentially for speaking on behalf of labor rights. Obviously a de facto co-President, she also ran the Ministries of Labor and Health, founded and ran the charitable Eva Peron Foundation, and founded and ran the nation's first large-scale female political party, the Female Peronist Party. She and her husband were compared to other spousal leaders such as the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand. Their reign was reffered to by TIME magazine as a "man and wife dictatorship".

According to several historians, in 1934 she suffered an attempt of rape. Eva and a friend had been invited to go to the coastal city of Mar del Plata by some male friends, but as soon as they left Junin they tried to rape them, and when resisting they decided to leave the girls in the middle of the road.Las mujeres y la patria, nuevas historias de amor de la historia argentina (2001), Lucia Galvez, ed. Norma. p. 206. That same year, fifteen year old Eva decided to quit school and try her luck in Buenos Aires, but she had to go back to Junin after she couldn't find a job. She then finished primary school in Junin, and spent the 1935 New Year's Eve with her family, but on January 2, 1935 she moved definitely to Buenos Aires. In her autobiography she explains that all the people from her town that had been to the big cities described them as "marvelous places, where nothing was given but wealth", so she figured out that Buenos Aires was the place for her to get away from the misery that surrounded her in the country.La Razon de mi vida, Eva Peron. Buro Editors.