A brilliant woman, insatiable student and magnificent writer, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The great figure of New Spanish literature of the 17th century, she was also a defender of women’s right to access knowledge, and a precursor of feminist causes.
Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana was born on November 12, 1648 (1651?) in San Miguel Nepantla (Mexico). She was a child prodigy, a brilliant teenager and a talented nun who left an invaluable legacy to Latin American letters.
Thanks to his intelligence and charisma he was able to overcome obstacles and delve into the study of the most important disciplines of his time. He mastered letters, astronomy, alchemy, music and architecture, among others. He did all this in addition to successfully carrying out his duties in the convent.
Complaints in verse
His life bears witness to his ideas, advanced for a century in which power structures were governed by men. Where the female role was limited to domestic and social roles, far from the study. Sor Juana was aware of this inequality and the unfair treatment of women and she denounced it in her texts.
The most famous example of this consciousness is his famous redondillas, stanzas composed of four verses, usually octosyllabic. These show the inequality in love relationships, and make visible the way in which women were unjustly subjected.
Foolish men you accuse
to the woman without reason
without seeing that you are the occasion
of the same thing that you blame (…)
This poem denounces how, at the end of the day, women are pointed out as guilty regardless of the attitude they hold towards male pretensions. When referring to men, the poem adds:
With favor and disdain
you have equal condition,
complaining, if they treat you badly,
mocking you, if they love you well (…)
Right to study
Not only in her octosyllables did Sor Juana show such injustices. In other texts he left intelligent and solid evidence of his position in favor of women’s rights, contravening the customs supported by the discourses that emerged from the political power, the social organization and the ecclesiastical hierarchy of New Spain.
His inevitable brilliance and undeniable talent earned the admiration (and sometimes envy) of his contemporaries. But also the unconditional favor of the Marchioness of Mancera, Leonor Carreto, viceroy between 1664 and 1673, who invited her to court when Juana was around 15 years old; as well as that of the Countess of Paredes, María Luisa Gonzaga Manrique de Lara, viceroy between 1680 and 1686, who cultivated a very close friendship with her and promoted the publication of her first works in Spain.
That intelligence has no sex was clear to Sor Juana. In 1682, in the letter with which she bid farewell to her confessor, Father Antonio Núñez de Miranda, her fierce defense of a woman’s right to study and knowledge is evident. The priest had long pressured her to abandon writing verses and dedicate her life only to her spiritual cultivation. Sor Juana, in her letter, is hurt by such insistence and defends the right of women to cultivate themselves:
“I am not unaware that publicly attending schools was not decent to the honesty of a woman.” […] But who has forbidden private and private studies to women? Don’t they have a rational soul like men? Well, why wouldn’t he enjoy the privilege of enlightenment like them? Is he not capable of as much grace and glory from God as yours?”
Precursor of feminists
A pioneer in the search for equity and a precursor of feminist struggles, she postulated the equality of men and women. To show the value of feminine virtues, he highlights them in various writings, as he does, for example, in the letters described here and in the poem dedicated to the Duchess of Aveiro, María Guadalupe de Lencastre, his friend and prominent Baroque intellectual. Hispanic, which he describes as:
(…) clear honor of women,
of learned men outrage,
What do you prove that it is not sex?
of intelligence part.
From Sister Juana to Sister Filotea
Another testimony of her defense of the female right to studies and knowledge was reflected when the bishop of Puebla and her epistolary friend, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, published with the title Athenagoric Letter (1690), and without the nun’s consent, a writing that she had sent him at his request, where she contradicted what the renowned theologian Antonio de Vieyra had expressed in the Mandate Sermon (1650) about the subtleties of Jesus Christ.
The Letter It was published accompanied by a text that Fernández signed with the pseudonym Sor Filotea, in which she commented on Sor Juana’s arguments and recommended that she dedicate her efforts to spiritual literature rather than worldly ones. “It is a pity that such a great understanding is so depressed by the filthy news of the earth that it does not wish to penetrate what is happening in Heaven,” he said, among other things.
The publication of both documents caused a stir in New Spain and had repercussions in a power struggle between the bishop of Puebla and the archbishop of Mexico, Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas, whose favorite theologian was, precisely, Antonio de Vieyra.
The right to make verses
Sor Juana, hurt, reacted to the Letter with his Response to Sister Filotea, an intense and exciting text where she summarizes her life, refers to her inclination to study and shows the greatness of women by listing thirty of them very notable. But what is most important is the fervor with which she defends female access to knowledge:
“What I have only wanted is to study so as to ignore less: that, according to Saint Augustine, some things are learned to do and others to just know. […] Well, what was the crime?”
In the same document he claims the right to… make verses!: “Well, our Catholic Church not only does not disdain them, but uses them in its Hymns.” Solidly, he rejects the belief that women, because they are women, “are considered so inept,” while men “just because they are women, they think they are wise.”
The Answer It was published posthumously, in 1700. Five years earlier, Sor Juana had died as a victim of an epidemic that reached the convent. Since then, the text has been analyzed and commented on by numerous scholars and critics, and is considered essential for understanding and contextualizing the life of the Hieronymite nun.
Sor Juana not only argued, but with her own life she bore witness to the greatness of women, she left a perennial mark on literature and showed her splendor in a century in which only men were allowed to shine.