Evita Peron

Eva "Evita" Perón (1919–1952) was the second wife of Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón and a political figure in her own right who shaped the social policy and popular following of mid-twentieth-century Peronism. Born María Eva Duarte in the village of Los Toldos in Buenos Aires Province, the youngest of five illegitimate children, she moved to Buenos Aires at fifteen and worked as a stage, film, and radio actress.

She met Colonel Juan Perón in 1944 at a relief gala for victims of the San Juan earthquake and married him the following year. After his election to the presidency in 1946, she organized the Eva Perón Foundation, which built schools, hospitals, and housing for the poor, and led the Female Peronist Party, which mobilized women voters after the 1947 law granting them the franchise.

In 1951 a Peronist rally in central Buenos Aires acclaimed her as candidate for vice president, but military opposition and her advancing illness forced her to decline in a public radio address. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and underwent surgery and radiotherapy in increasing pain. Her speeches in the final year retained their direct address to descamisados, the "shirtless ones."

She died on 26 July 1952 at thirty-three. Her embalmed body was displayed during nearly a month of national mourning and then disappeared into a sequence of clandestine moves after the 1955 coup that overthrew Perón, returning to Argentina only in 1974.

The given name Eva derives from Hebrew Ḥawwā, traditionally connected to a verbal root meaning to live; Evita is its Spanish diminutive, used affectionately. The surname Perón is a Spanish family name of Aragonese origin. She took the surname on marriage and signed political and personal correspondence with it.