In Shaping the madre patria, I track the lives of four influential women to show how each ultimately became iconic. In Spain, I focus on Carmen Polo and Carmencita Franco to show how the Francoist-controlled media used the mother/daughter duo to convey ideal notions of family and femininity. The Spanish singer/actress Concha Piquer provides a different model of female identity in the post-civil war years. Eva Pern, the Argentinean icon of this study, fuses together the salient characteristics of Concha Piquer and Carmen Polo de Franco in that, like Piquer, she was a performer, yet, like Carmen Polo, the move that catapulted her to celebrity was her marriage to a powerful man and her subsequent position as Argentinean First Lady. The purpose of studying these women, and their representations in different media, is to reveal that each one was an icon, or revered symbol, at a time when women were scarcely in the public sphere.