Imelda Marcos

Imelda Marcos (born 1929) is a Filipino politician and former first lady of the Philippines, the wife of President Ferdinand Marcos and a central figure of his rule from 1965 to 1986. Born Imelda Romualdez in Manila and raised in Tacloban, Leyte, she studied at St Paul's College in Tacloban and at the Philippine Women's University, where she graduated in 1952, and was crowned Rose of Tacloban and a runner-up for Miss Manila in the early 1950s.

She married Ferdinand Marcos in 1954 after an eleven-day courtship and became first lady when he was elected president in 1965. She held formal posts including Governor of Metro Manila from 1975 to 1986 and Minister of Human Settlements from 1978 to 1986, and she presided over a cultural agenda that produced the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Folk Arts Theater, and the Philippine International Convention Center.

After the assassination of Senator Benigno Aquino in 1983 and the People Power Revolution of February 1986, the Marcoses fled to Hawaii. Reporters who entered Malacañang Palace recorded a personal collection of more than a thousand pairs of shoes, which became a worldwide symbol of the regime's excess.

She returned to the Philippines after her husband's death in 1989, ran unsuccessfully for president in 1992 and 1998, and served four terms in the House of Representatives, latterly for Ilocos Norte. In 2018 a Philippine anti-graft court convicted her of seven counts of graft.

The given name Imelda is of Old German origin, from elements meaning whole or universal and battle. Used for girls in Italian, Spanish, and Filipino communities, it has accompanied her through a long and divisive public life.