Man, in sum, the greatest marvel
posed to human comprehension,
a synthesis composed
of qualities of angel, plant, and beast,
whose elevated baseness
shows traits of each of these. 

—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “El Sueño,” lines 690-695.¹

Colonial Latin America’s great feminist poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (ca. 1648-1695), combined images of transcendence with the immanence of nature in her eloquent writing. Her theological perspective that human beings are made up of “qualities of angel, plant, and beast” has come to be described in the contemporary world in terms of evolution and genetics. Her belief in the capacity of women to compete with men has also continued to be supported in the documentation of female agency throughout nature and history. Juana excelled at the observation and analysis of natural phenomena and was determined to extend those intellectual skills in the study of theology—queen of the sciences. Her belief in her own intelligence was a challenge to social norms that instilled a general disbelief in women’s intelligence. She lived with a persistent internal conflict as a result of this disconnect between her innate abilities and the construction of culture. In her own era, Juana vividly described her personal inclination and drive from childhood to learn and study, and the social tension that resulted. Her determination in the face of a demeaning patriarchal system created a new historical legacy demonstrating the role social tension and stasis play in the progression of human knowledge. Her extraordinary ability to incorporate personal inspiration into academic tradition allowed her to break through intellectual boundaries, but her work only became an historical legacy because of her ability to analyze her options and to secure political alliances.

Having been a lady in waiting at Mexico City’s viceregal court from 1664 until entering the Santa Paula convent in 1669, Juana first built an alliance with the Marqués and Marquesa de Mancera and established enough ongoing ties at court to develop strong personal relationships with three other viceroys. These governing viceroys included the Viceroy-Archbishop Payo Enríquez de Rivera, who commissioned her to design a triumphal arch in 1680, and the Marqués de la Laguna, for whom the arch was constructed upon his assuming the post of viceroy, and whose wife, the Marquesa, sponsored the publication of Sor Juana’s first volume of collected works in Spain in 1689.² These accomplishments were not only remarkable in and of themselves, she also had to overcome both institutionalized sexism and an illegitimate birth.

Born in the Mexican heartland of the viceroyalty of New Spain, Juana Inés Ramírez de Asbaje and her two full sisters were the illegitimate daughters of Isabel Ramírez and a father hidden in the shadows, who may have been Pedro Manuel de Asbaje or Friar F. (or H.) de Asvaje. The little girl lived with her mother and sisters in her grandfather Pedro Ramírez’s house until his death in 1656, but she still was a girl without a legally recognized father in a culture that focused on male heads of households as the basic social and political agents. Though women of the seventeenth-century Spanish empire could inherit property and sell goods in the marketplace, “Women were under patria potestad (subject to their father’s will) until they were twenty-five years old, when they gained complete personal independence if they remained unmarried.”³ And if they entered a convent, as Juana Inés did, to escape being under a husband’s will, there was still constant pressure that they should submit to the spiritual guidance of a male confessor. Even the revered founder of the discalced Carmelites, immortalized by Bernini, St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), had to go through the motions of submitting to a priest.⁴ In La Dorotea (1632), the influential author Lope de Vega did present a list of women who excelled in intelligence, fidelity and arms, but most women were portrayed by a humble Dorotea as “apprehensive” and overly emotional, “a reservoir of tears.”⁵ In this authoritarian world, Juana identified with the women who excelled. By her own account, unable to limit her thirst for knowledge, Juana Inés Ramírez de Asbaje pursued a transdisciplinary quest to embrace a complicated cosmos.

At about the age of three, out of affection for one of her older sisters and out of what she later described as “mischief,” young Juana Inés followed her sibling to a girls’ grammar school. There she was taught to read unbeknownst to her mother. She feared punishment for her accomplishment, but she was “inflamed with the desire to know how to read,” and with her teacher’s compliance, she went on to impress her mother with her precociousness.⁶ From then on, she would struggle to come to terms with her society’s discomfort with precocious females. Even after being told that girls were excluded from the centers of male public performance, including university, she refused to give up a skill with which she had triumphed. She would be unable to reconcile her conception of self with the one her society imposed upon her. Struggling throughout her life to resolve this tension, she was often torn between self-criticism and defiance, and near the end of her life in her autobiographical “Response to Sor Filotea de la Cruz,” written in 1691, she reflected:

When later, being six or seven, and having learned how to read and write, along with all the other skills in needlework and household arts that girls learn, it came to my attention that in Mexico City there were Schools, and a University, in which one studied the sciences. The moment I heard this, I began to plague my mother with insistent and importunate pleas: she should dress me in boy’s clothing and send me to Mexico City to live with relatives, to study and be tutored at the University. She would not permit it, and she was wise, but I assuaged my disappointment by reading the many and varied books belonging to my grandfather, and there were not enough punishments, nor reprimands, to prevent me from reading….

I began to study Latin grammar… and so intense was my concern that though among women (especially a woman in the flower of her youth) the natural adornment of one’s hair is held in such high esteem, I cut off mine to the breadth of some four to six fingers, measuring the place it had reached, and imposing upon myself the condition that if by the time it had again grown to that length I had not learned such and such a thing I had set for myself to learn while my hair was growing, I would again cut it off as punishment…. (A)nd in fact I did cut it in punishment for such stupidity: for there seemed to me no cause for a head to be adorned with hair and naked of learning—which was the more desired embellishment.⁷

Given her society’s assumption that men were naturally more rational than women, she began to associate the physical attributes of a woman, in particular her hair, as a hindrance to her learning, even acting out the belief that her character could be altered by her appearance.⁸ This concern for control of her body may have had even deeper motivations than those of self-discipline. The exclusion of girls from certain forums had been spelled out for Juana Inés, contrary to her own experience of a girl’s ability to compete in that forum. At the same time, it must have been through personal experience that she came to fear that being a girl left one vulnerable to even more dire consequences. It was not just social tradition that posed a barrier to women in achieving their ambitions:

(I)f a father desires to provide his daughters with more than ordinary learning, he is forced by necessity, and by the absence of wise elder women, to bring men to teach the skills of reading, writing, counting, the playing of musical instruments, and other accomplishments, from which no little harm results, as is experienced every day in doleful examples of perilous association, because through the immediacy of contact and the intimacy born from the passage of time, what one may never have thought possible is easily accomplished. For which reason many prefer to leave their daughters unpolished and uncultured rather than to expose them to such notorious peril as that of familiarity with men….⁹

Juana Inés would have to use all her skills to find a community that supported her intellectual development and to find a place where she felt safe. She would befriend both men and women who provided her with some security against a demeaning patriarchal system and its threats.

Despite her illegitimate birth and criticism of cultural norms, Juana Inés had many allies in life, and from diverse individuals, she constructed a working network. Through the introduction of relatives who lived in Mexico City and through her own talents, between 1664 and her entry into the convent, Juana served as a lady-in-waiting to the Vireina Leonor Carreto, Marquesa de Mancera at the Mexico City court of Antonio Sebastián de Toledo, Marqués de Mancera, the Spanish viceroy, or governor, of New Spain. Remarking it was her recollection of knowledge and not her own wit that won her admiration, she described how she had never really been invited to participate in public dialogue. Instead she was expected to pay homage to the men who were: “… so that when I came to the city many marveled, not so much at my natural wit, as at my memory, and at the amount of learning I had mastered at an age when many had scarcely learned to speak well.”¹⁰ This is corroborated by the Jesuit Diego Calleja, who wrote a biographical, almost hagiographical, account of her to be published in Spain with the third volume of her collected works in 1700. He never met her in person, but he maintained a correspondence with her and knew several of her intimates, including the Marqués de Mancera. According to Calleja, she drew attention because of the cleverness she gained through careful study and through the “good looks” that nature had granted her.¹¹ She had been invited to groom the heroes of intellectual conversation at court, to flatter her superiors. Having been born in 1648 or 1652, she was between twelve or sixteen when this task was set for her by her diligence in study. Although young, she was not willing to be defined by the prevailing social conventions. Her social skills and intellect were so exceptional that she found ways to circumvent the limitations placed on women. Her genuine fascination with others resulted in life-long friendships—and beyond, to the generations that have found her story in history books:

…I heard nothing without meditation, even in the most minute and imperfect things; because as there is no creature, however lowly, in which one cannot recognize that God made me, there is none that does not astound reason, if properly meditated on. Thus, I reiterate, I saw and admired all things; so that even the very persons with whom I spoke, and the things they said, were cause for a thousand mediations. Whence the variety of genius and wit, being all of