Alcira de la Peña

Alcira de la Peña (8 November 1910 to 15 March 1998) was an Argentine physician and political leader, born in Buenos Aires to immigrant parents and raised partly in Salto. She worked as a cigarette-factory packer, proofreader and nurse to pay for her studies, entered the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires, and after being expelled for her political activity finished at the National University of Córdoba, where she took her medical surgeon title in 1942. She was imprisoned several times and, finding it impossible to practise medicine, gave herself fully to politics: she chaired the National Women's Commission of the Argentine Communist Party from 1945 to 1959, ran for Vice President in 1951 and 1954, and in 1958 became one of the first two women on the Deliberative Council of Buenos Aires. She co-founded the Argentine League for the Rights of Man in 1937. This entry is a reference record, not medical advice.