Eva Perón: A Woman with Controversy Introduction: July 26th, 1952, Eva Duarte de Perón, the first lady of the Argentine Republic, passed away from cancer at 8:25 PM at the presidential residence Casa Rosada. Soon after, her death was announced by the Subsecretariat of Information and the government declared national day of mourning, suspended all activities as well as ordered all flags flown at half-staff for ten days (BBC, Eva Peron Dies). During Eva’s four-day long funeral, the city of Buenos Aires was packed with nearly three million grieving people and enormous piles of flowers. Many working class Argentine people revered Eva as Evita or “la dama de la esperanza” who brought them hope for a better life. However, Eva’s political and …show more content…
Their hatred to Eva was actual their fear of Eva’s Peronist ideology, which took over their aristocratic power and altered their social position. As Navarro wrote, “This image of Evita [official portrayal of Eva in Argentina] was a mask that hid another woman: the shrewd and jealous politician who bullied ministers, worked at a frantic pace, and ran the Eva Perón Foundation and the Partido Peronista Femenino with an iron hand” (Navarro, 112). Eva would not give mercy to her opponents. One example was her order to close down the aristocratic Sociedad de Beneficencia. Traditionally, the club would invite the first lady to be its president but they refused to admit Eva because of her low class origin and audacity in breaking the traditional role of womanhood (Bourn, Eva Perón, 249). Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, Argentine journalist and author who wrote biography on Eva Perón, would agree with people from aristocratic Sociedad de Beneficencia. Ortiz, like other aristocratic elites would, showed her disdain of Eva in her description of Eva. She depicted Eva’s early life in Buenos Aires as “an ancestral defect, an aptitude of survive by ‘satisfying passions’” because she inherited “bed-hopping” ability from her mother who had an affair with her father (Ortiz). She also criticized Eva in her appearance, “her whole history is formed by… her hairstyles”, “Evita’s dresses reveals everything about her, her fears as well as her audacity” (Ortiz). Mary Main, in her biography of Eva, The Woman with the Whip (1952), described Eva as a “sadistic whore” (Main). Those words represented the opinion of the social elites who despised her. The elites were shocked to see a working class woman slowly climbed to highest social position for a female in Argentine society. Their hatred to Eva was actual their fear of Eva’s Peronist ideology, which took over their aristocratic power and altered