Coming from humble origins but possessed of a driving sense of ambition, Evita exploited her good looks and winning personality to charm officials and politicians into accepting her direct involvement in public affairs. Her personal touch, as much as her active promotion of women's rights at a formal level, helped to advance female emancipation. Here was a woman successfully breaking the conventions of a traditionally male-dominated society and actively entering national politics.
Although Evita had innate charm, there was also a toughness about her, which she explained as a product of her hard upbringing. Born illegitimately to a poor immigrant family which was then abandoned by her father, she had gone as a teenager to Buenos Aires where she earned a living as a nightclub hostess and dancer and played small parts in radio plays and films. Unashamed of the aggressive style of some of her speeches, she justified it by reference to her personal experience of poverty.
She embarked on a series of foreign tours, including one to Europe in 1947 during which her elegance and stylish dress sense elevated her to international celebrity status. Building on her growing popularity and influence, Evita used her contacts to establish the Women's Peronist Party in 1947, her declared purpose being to guarantee that in future 'no Argentine woman would any longer be denied the privilege of being a Peronist'. She stressed that 'just as only workers can wage their own struggle for liberation, so, too, only women can be the salvation of women'. She was concerned to stress, however, that her particular form of feminism was an adjunct, not a challenge, to Peronism.
Excerpt from My Mission in Life by Eva Peron, published by Vantage Press, USA, 1953, p. iii.
According to Source I, why was Eva Peron so concerned to give the credit to her husband for what she had achieved?
I was not, nor am I anything more than a humble woman, a sparrow in an immense flock of sparrows, but Peron was, and is, a gigantic condor that flies high and sure among the summits and near to God. If it had not been for him who came down to my level and taught me to fly in another fashion, I would never have been able to contemplate the marvellous and magnificent immenseness of my people All that
I am, all that I have, all that I think and all that I feel, belongs to Peron.
World History
