Isabel Perón assumed office as Vice President of Argentina after being elected on the same ticket as her husband Juan Perón, a first for a woman in the country.
On 23 September 1973, following a landslide general election victory for the Perón-Perón ticket, Isabel Perón was sworn in as Vice President of Argentina, becoming the first woman to hold that office in the nation's history.
The ticket paired her with her husband, the returning populist leader Juan Domingo Perón, who was elected to a third term as president after eighteen years of exile and proscription of Peronism. Isabel's selection as running mate was unusual: she had no independent political base, prior elected experience, or ideological faction of her own within the fractious Peronist movement, and her candidacy was widely seen as a vehicle for consolidating loyalty around Juan Perón himself.
Her elevation to the vice presidency was nonetheless historic, placing a woman a heartbeat away from the presidency in a country, and a region, where women had only recently gained full political rights (Argentine women received the vote in 1947, championed by Juan Perón's iconic second wife, Eva Perón). Isabel's own relative lack of political identity, however, meant she entered the vice presidency largely as a symbolic and family extension of Peronism rather than as an autonomous political actor.
This vice-presidential term set the stage for an even more historic and fraught transition just nine months later, when Juan Perón's declining health thrust Isabel into the presidency itself.