Eva's childhood experience was very traumatic and rough. Her father, Juan Duarte, was not married to Eva's mother. He would not allow Eva to bear the family name because of this. When Eva was six, her father died in a car accident. She, her mother, and her siblings were refused entrance to her father's funeral because Eva and her sisters were illegitimate. From then on, Eva and her remaining family went to work as servants for richer families throughout the city. Her childhood was extremely painful, as she never really had a father figure to look up to nor a decent place to live.
One of the main goals for Eva in her early years was to be an actress. She had wanted to be an actress ever since she had began watching movies as a young child. Her inspiration was a young actress named Norma Shearer. Obesity seemed to run in Eva's family, and she did not want to be obese because she wanted to be thin and beautiful like Norma Shearer. Because of this, Eva did not eat at all when she was at home. Instead, she preferred to drink mate cocido, a type of herbal tea. Norma Shearer played a main role in her life as an actress, mainly because Eva wanted to strive for things that she had never experienced before, wealth and fame. As an aspiring 15 year old actress, Evita faced almost insurmountable odds in landing jobs in the theatre. She led a miserable existence, often falling ill and never having much to eat. Again and again she was turned down for the parts of roles in numerous plays. In exchange for work, she often slept with directors. Acting work was terribly hard for her to get, and she never really made it big in the movies. Ultimately, her career as an actress never really reached its climax because nobody wanted to hire her.
When Eva married the soon to be president of Argentina, Juan Peron, her luck changed. After he was elected, Eva did a variety of things to help the people of her country. She cemented her ties with the workers by establishing the Social Aid Foundation. Through this charity, scores of hospitals and hundreds of schools were built, nurses trained, and money dispensed to the poor. Eva also furthered the cause of the women's political party, the Peronista Feminist Party. Eva's finest personal and political moment came with her long tour of Europe, during which she met with Franco, the dictator of Spain, Pope Pius XII, and the Italian and French foreign ministers. She absolutely dazzled post war Europe with her jewels and elegant gowns. Her rags to riches story was told and retold in the press, and she was even on the cover of Time magazine. Eva Peron gave the people of Argentina hope, as she was living testimony that a poor girl who grew up in the slums of her country could someday rise to the top and live life to its fullest extent.
"There are some oligarchs that make me want to bite them just as one crunches into a carrot or a radish."
"When you represent a state you cannot be scared" -Eva Peron
"In government, one actress is enough"
"We all have within us a gallery of personalities, and one of them ends up taking the driver's seat. In Evita the queen cohabited with more impoverished personalities, but the queen was there nonetheless; it always had been. If Peron guaranteed her victory, it is not he who conceived it." -Alicia Dujovne Ortiz on Evita.
"More than political action, the woman's movement needs to carry out social action. Precisely because social action is something which we women carry in our blood."
"I know that, like every woman of the people, I have more strength than I appear to have."
"Evita had the capacity to give before anything was asked of her....she was incredibly beautiful but no one could ever treat her as if she was a woman. It was as if she was a different being, untouchable, not cold in the least, but without any sexual presence whatsoever...I have never met anyone else who resembled her." -Guillermo de Prisco, Union official and devoted "Evitista"
"There were human beings in that room with dirty clothes and they smelt very bad. Evita would place her fingers into their suppurating wounds for she was able to see the pain of all these people and feel it herself. She could touch the most terrible things with a Christian attitude that amazed me, kissing and letting herself be kissed. There was a girl whose lip was half eaten away by syphilis and when I saw that Evita was about to kiss her and tried to stop her, she said to me, 'Do you know what it will mean when I kiss her?' " -Jose Maria Castineira de Dios, young Catholic poet who had watched Evita at work.
"Sometimes I have wished my insults were slaps or lashes; I've wanted to hit people in the face and make them see, if only for a day, what I see each day I help people."
"The evil of this time and especially of this country is the existence of all these idiots, and you know that an idiot is worse than a viliian." -Juan Peron, in a letter he wrote to Evita after being held prisoner.
"...there was a woman of fragile appearence, but with a strong voice, with long blonde hair falling loose to her back and fevered eyes. She said her name was Eva Duarte, that she acted on the radio and that she wanted to help the people of San Juan. I looked at her and felt overcome by her words; I was quite subdued by the force of her voice and her look. Eva was pale but when she spoke her face seemed to catch fire. Her hands were reddened with tension, her fingers knit tightly together, she was a mass of nerves." -Juan Peron, on first meeting Evita.
"Charity humiliates and social aid dignifies and stimulates. Charity is given discreetly; social aid rationally. Charity prolongs the situation; social aid solves it....Charity is the generosity of the fortunate; social aid remedies social inequalities."
"Keeping books on social aid is capitalistic nonsense. I just use the money for the poor. I can't stop to count it."
"If we had done for the workers a tiny fraction of what Evita did, there never would have been a Peron and she would still be a bad actress." -One of Eva's more intelligent enemies commenting on the lack of aid from the oligarchy to the poor.
"I spend every hour of the day looking after the needs of the descamisados to show them that here, in the Argentine Republic...the gulf which had seperated the people from the government no longer exists."
"Time is my greatest enemy."
"I would willingly die a thousand times for my descamisados."