Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz

This is a painting of Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, one of the most celebrated Latin American authors of the Colonial period (1651-1695). An essayist, playwright, and poet, Juana Inéz de la Cruz decided to join a convent at an early age because she thought it was the best way “to have no fixed occupation which might curtail my freedom to study”. (I.e, getting married and having children would have hampered this ambition). De la Cruz was an ardent proponent of educating girls and women, and she had to fight her entire life to get the learning she so desired.

As a young affluent girl in Colonial Mexico, Juana was largely self-taught, sneaking off to her grandfather’s library. She learned Latin and the indigenous Nahuatl language, and studied Aristotelian philosophy. Later she begged her mother to let her disguise herself as a man so she could go to higher level schools, but was refused. As a nun, she wrote poetry, essays, drama, and works on music — many of her writings have been lost, but in her day she was so accomplished that her nunnery became a sort of intellectual salon where other women hungry for knowledge and culture met.

One of the subjects for which Juana Inéz de la Cruz is most famous is her condemnation of patriarchy. In her poem “You Foolish Men”, for instance, she criticizes men who want women to be a certain way and then vilify them when they are. “Hombres necios que acusáis,/ a la mujer, sin razón/ sin ver que sois la ocasión/ de lo mismo que culpáis . . .” (“You foolish men that accuse women without a reason, without seeing that you’re to blame of the same thing you accuse . . .). In witty lines, she points out that men sleep around, but expect women to be pure, but then think these women are boring, but if other women like sex, then those women are slutty — it’s an old situation, but de la Cruz shone a spotlight on it well before many others would publish these sentiments.

Sadly, Juana Inéz de la Cruz was condemned for her critiques of patriarchy by Catholic Church, and forced to sell her books and focus her work on charity in 1694. She died the year after, having caught the plague while tending to her fellow sisters.