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A Feminine Icon of an accomplished woman
Maria Eva Peron was born in 1919 in the argentine 'pampa', an illegitimate daughter of a peasant woman and of a landowner. "Up till the age of eleven I believed that the existence of poor and rich was a natural thing as the existence of the grass and the trees. When for the first time I heard a worker say that the poor existed because the rich were too rich I recognised the truth".
At the age of 16 she moves to Buenos Aires and joins a theatrical company before becoming a cinema actress. As a popular radio broadcaster she defends the social reforms of colonel Peron, when he is being imprisoned by the military force: "there is no force which can bend the will of a people knowing its rights. The enemies of the people have only one scope and that is the enslavement of the nation".
Eventually she marries and succeeds him in power, passing new laws such as the political vote for the women, the legal rights of illegitimate children, the social benefits for poor mothers. "No-one else but the people calls me Evita. Only the 'descamisados' have learned to call me in this way. When a little boy calls me Evita, I take upon myself to be mother of all the children and of all the humble and poor of the earth. When a worker calls me Evita I take upon myself with joy to be companion of all the men who toil in my country and in the al world. When a woman of my motherland calls me Evita I take upon myself to be sister of that woman and of all the women of the human kind."
Evita falls sick to a breast cancer from her hospital bed the parliament proclaims her to be spiritual head of the nation: her last words are still to be found on the walls of streets in Argentina "One day I shall return" .