"I Will Come Again and I Will be Millions." Evita and Hillary

It doesn't really matter what your opinion is of Eva Peron or her politics. In sum, she carved out a place for herself in history that has made her the stuff of legends and myths. As with all great people, she was posessed of traits both good and bad. The adoring throngs saw what they wanted to see, as did her detractors. Some of the similarities between these two women are remarkable, and if you've studied Evita, you'll see them.

Most of all, however, it was the pose Hillary struck today - and this photo - which brought Evita to mind. What Legends will be written of Hillary? She's been given a clean slate today, I think, and I hope she writes her own story to be remembered for generations.



http://news.uns.purdue.edu/images/+2008/Convos-EvitaLO.jpg

Women's suffrage

On February 27, 1946, three days after the elections, a political speech was given in an organized act to thank the women for their support of Perón's candidacy. In that opportunity she called for the equality of men and women and suffrage for her fellow females of the nation.

The Argentine woman has surpassed the period of the civil positions of a guardian. The woman must affirm her action, the woman must vote. The woman, moral means of her home, must occupy the site in the complex social gear of the town. It requests a new necessity to organize itself more in extended and rejuvenated groups. It demands it, in sum, the transformation of the woman concept, who has been increasing sacrificadamente the number of her duties without requesting the minimum of her rights.

Female suffrage caused controversy, but the Congress was pressed to pass it. The Senate sanctioned it on the 21st of August of 1946, and it was necessary to wait for more than a year before the House of Representatives could sanction it on the 9th of September, 1947. Law 13,010, established the equality of political rights between men and women and universal suffrage in Argentina. Finally, Law 13,010 was approved unanimously.


Peronist Feminist Party

Eva Perón also created the Female Peronist Party, which was the first large female political party in the nation. Navarro and Fraser write that by 1952, the party had 500,000 members and 3,600 headquarters across the country. In the election of 1952, this base of support won Perón the election by sixty-three percent. Navarro and Fraser also write that Evita has often been given credit for gaining for women the right to vote, but that this is not the case. Nor was Evita, even by her own admission, truly a feminist. And yet her impact on women in Argentina, write Navarro and Fraser, was great.

"Yet Evita's effect on the condition of women in Argentina and on their political life was decisive; what she accomplished here was as important as anything else she did. A mass of women who cared little about women's rights and were indifferent to the concerns of middle-class feminists had entered politics because of Evita. They were the first Argentine women to be active in politics, they gave Perón a large majority in 1951 and they remained loyal to him and what they saw as the principles of Peronism long after their inspiration and figurehead had died."

Eventually, she declined the invitation to run for vice-president, saying her only ambition was that in the large chapter of history that would be written about her husband, she hoped that in the footnotes there would be mention of a woman who brought the "hopes and dreams of the people to the president", who eventually turned those hopes and dreams into "glorious reality". In Peronist rhetoric, this event has come to be referred to as "The Renouncement", portraying Evita as having been a selfless woman in line with the Hispanic myth of marianismo. Most biographers, however, postulate that Evita did not so much renounce her ambition as bow out due to pressure from her husband, the military, and the Argentine upper class, who preferred that she not enter the race.

"'I will come again, and I will be millions,' Evita had said in one of her apocalyptic last speeches just before her death; but even she could not have foreseen her sudden transformation, from Latin American politician and religiose national cult figure to late-twentieth-century popular culture folk heroine.... In her own country her story is at last part of history, arousing the sort of peaceful controversy one might expect from so astonishing a career. In the rest of the world, however, she has attained the condition of apotheosis — becoming a deity in the new world pantheon of electric celebrity."

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Per%C3%B3n

I really would like to direct it someday.

will she be played by Madonna?

She is a trail blazer and will continue her path for many years to come. America is lucky to have her.