Eva Perón, or "Evita," as she liked to be called, had a profound influence on history. Her obituary in The New York Times (1952) described her as "ambitious, beautiful, ruthless," and it chronicled her life in one short phrase: "She began in obscurity and rose to the heights." Remarkably, she rose in only 12 years "from obscurity to fame, wealth and power on the unpredictable currents of Argentine political life" (The New York Times, 1952). Evita's important role in the government, her influence on the international scene, and her personal power as a woman left an indelible impact on history, and the story of how she rose to power is so compelling that it has already been told in musicals and film.
Evita was born the illegitimate child of Juan Duarte, a local Argentinian landowner who abandoned her mother when she was three years old (Navarro, 1977, p. 229). Growing up in a Buenos Aires province with her family, Evita was disinterested in school and after finishing her primary schooling in 1935, she went to Buenos Aires to become an actress at the age of 15 (Navarro, 1977, p. 230). She lived in "cheap and dirty pensiones" and suffered from hunger and cold in the winter as she made the rounds in the theater, but she "never [played] a better role than a maid or a silent character that disappeared too soon from the stage" (Navarro, 1977, p. 230). Likewise, she tried to break into films but could only garner meager roles (Navarro, 1977, p. 230). She finally gained success in the radio when she headed her own soap opera company in 1939
From these inauspicious beginnings, Evita rose to a life of power that distinguished her from her fellow Argentinians struggling under the same poverty that she had grown up in. When she was 24, she met Juan Perón, a 48-year-old widower, in 1944 at a fund raiser for earthquake victims, and within two months they were living together-"a situation socially unacceptable for...