All Thinkers

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) was a poet, dramatist, scholar, and nun of colonial New Spain, widely regarded as the finest writer of the Spanish Baroque in the Americas. She was born Juana Ramírez de Asbaje in San Miguel Nepantla, a village near Mexico City, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish captain and a Creole woman of Spanish descent. She taught herself to read at the age of three, devoured the books in her grandfather's library, and begged her mother to let her dress as a boy so she could attend university — which was closed to women. At sixteen she became a lady-in-waiting at the viceregal court of New Spain, where she astonished scholars with her learning. Rather than marry, she entered a convent in 1669, first the Carmelites and then the Hieronymites, where she could continue her studies and writing. Her cell became one of the great intellectual centres of the Americas, filled with books, musical and scientific instruments, and a stream of visitors. She wrote love poetry, religious verse, philosophical essays, plays, and comic dramas in Spanish, Latin, Nahuatl, and the Afro-Mexican creole of her time. In the early 1690s, church authorities pressured her to abandon secular studies. She signed a statement of submission in her own blood, sold her library of some four thousand books, and died in 1695 while nursing her sisters through an epidemic.

Origin
New Spain (Mexico)
Lifespan
1648-1695
Era
17th century
Subjects
Philosophy Literature Feminism Colonial Latin America Religion
Skills
Critical Thinking Creative Expression Cultural Heritage And Identity Ethical Thinking Research Skills
Why They Matter

Sor Juana matters because she produced a body of work of extraordinary intellectual and literary range within a colonial religious society that was hostile to women's learning, and because she wrote one of the clearest defences of women's right to knowledge in any language. In her Reply to Sister Philothea, written in 1691 in response to a bishop who had rebuked her for studying secular subjects, she laid out a rigorous argument: women have the same intellectual capacities as men, Scripture and tradition provide many examples of learned women, and the study of the world is not opposed to the service of God but part of it. The Reply is one of the foundational texts of Latin American literature and one of the earliest systematic feminist essays written anywhere in the Americas. Beyond the Reply, her poetry includes some of the finest lyric verse in the Spanish language, her philosophical poem Primero Sueño stages an ambitious journey of the intellect through the whole of creation, and her dramatic works engaged with philosophy, theology, and the experiences of the Indigenous and African populations of New Spain. She remains a central figure in Mexican and global literary and philosophical heritage.

Key Ideas
1
Women's right to learn
Sor Juana argued that women have the same capacity for thought and study as men, and that the customs barring them from education were unjust and contrary to reason and to Scripture. She made her case in her Reply to Sister Philothea, written after a bishop criticised her for engaging in secular learning. She listed many learned women from the Bible, the early Church, and classical antiquity, and she argued from her own experience that the desire to know was given by God. This defence of women's education was developed in a colonial religious society that offered few examples and many obstacles.
2
Learning as a calling from God
Sor Juana described her love of learning not as a personal preference but as a vocation she could not refuse. She traced this desire back to her earliest childhood: learning to read in secret at three, refusing sweets so she would study harder, cutting her hair as a punishment when she did not learn quickly enough. She argued that a desire this deep and this early could only be a gift from the Creator. To refuse it would be to refuse a calling. This framing allowed her to defend her scholarship as religious fidelity rather than as disobedience.
3
Knowledge is connected: you cannot study one thing alone
Sor Juana argued that no subject could be studied properly in isolation. To understand theology she needed to understand philosophy. To understand philosophy she needed to understand logic, rhetoric, physics, astronomy, music, mathematics, history, and languages. Each subject illuminated the others. This was not an excuse for unlimited curiosity but a principled view of how knowledge actually works: the world is one connected whole, and studying any part of it leads you to the others. Her intellectual range was not accidental but a consequence of this view.
Key Quotations
"I do not study in order to write, nor still less to teach, but only to see whether by studying I may become less ignorant."
— Reply to Sister Philothea, 1691
Sor Juana is defending the motive of her studies. She is not seeking fame, publication, or teaching positions — the last of which were closed to women in any case. She is studying because she finds herself ignorant and wants to be less so. This is a classical philosophical stance, going back at least to Socrates: the recognition of one's own ignorance as the starting point for the pursuit of wisdom. Framed in her own voice, the statement answers critics who assumed she was driven by vanity or ambition.
"Foolish men who accuse woman without reason, without seeing that you are the cause of the very thing you blame."
— Hombres necios, c.1690
The opening of her most famous poem captures its method: a direct, rhymed, rhythmic indictment of men who blame women for the consequences of men's own demands. The argument unfolds through a series of paired examples showing how men create impossible situations for women and then condemn women for the results. The poem has remained famous because its target — a double standard that punishes women for what men encourage them to do — has proved remarkably durable across centuries.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Creative Expression When introducing poetry as a tool for making arguments
How to introduce
Read Hombres necios aloud in class, either in Spanish (if students speak Spanish) or in translation. Ask students to identify the argument the poem is making. Then ask: why write an argument as a poem rather than as an essay? What does the rhyme, the rhythm, and the pairing of examples do that prose might not? Discuss how poetry can carry serious moral and philosophical arguments and is not limited to private feelings or pretty images. Connect to the tradition of verse argument in other cultures, including the poetry of Pablo Neruda.
Ethical Thinking When examining women's access to education
How to introduce
Tell students the story of the young Juana Ramírez: she taught herself to read at three, begged to be allowed to attend university, and was told that was not possible because of her sex. Ask: what does this tell us about how societies have organised access to learning? Then ask: are there still places in the world where girls and women cannot study what they want, or cannot study at all? Connect to Nadia Murad and to the current situations described in global reports on girls' education. What arguments can be made for the universal right to learn?
Further Reading

For a short introduction

The Poems, Protest, and a Dream selection translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (1997, Penguin) offers a generous English-language entry to her work, including the Reply.

For a biographical overview

Octavio Paz's Sor Juana (1988, Harvard University Press), by the Mexican Nobel laureate, is a readable and important study. The entry on Sor Juana in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a reliable free introduction.

Key Ideas
1
Everyday experience as philosophical source
In the Reply, Sor Juana offered striking examples of how philosophical insights could come from everyday activities traditionally assigned to women. Watching an egg cook taught her about transformation and change. Weaving taught her about structure and order. She joked that if Aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more. Behind the joke is a serious argument: the domestic work assigned to women is not intellectually empty, and the confinement of women to it does not keep them from philosophy but gives them different sources for it. Philosophy is not restricted to libraries.
2
The moral critique of hypocrisy: Hombres necios
In her most famous short poem, often called Hombres necios or Foolish Men, Sor Juana turned a sharp moral critique on the men of her society who blamed women for the very behaviours men demanded of them. They pursued women and then condemned them for responding; they paid for sinful companionship and then despised those who provided it; they wanted women to be both virtuous and available. The poem is witty, devastating, and structurally rigorous: each stanza exposes a new hypocrisy. It is one of the earliest systematic critiques of sexual double standards in the poetry of the Americas.
3
Primero Sueño: the mind's journey through creation
Primero Sueño, or First Dream, is Sor Juana's most ambitious philosophical poem. Nearly a thousand lines long, it describes the soul's journey in sleep: freed from the body's activity, the mind rises through the orders of creation — mineral, vegetable, animal, human, angelic — attempting to comprehend the whole of reality. The journey ends in failure: the mind cannot hold the totality of knowledge it seeks, and the dawn returns it to the limits of waking life. The poem is a Baroque meditation on the ambition and the limits of human understanding, written in some of the densest and most beautiful Spanish verse ever composed.
Key Quotations
"If Aristotle had cooked, he would have written a great deal more."
— Reply to Sister Philothea, 1691
This witty remark carries a serious argument. Aristotle wrote extensively about substances, changes, and transformations, and Sor Juana is suggesting that the practical experience of cooking — watching ingredients change, mixing substances, observing how heat affects different materials — would have given him even more material to think about. The deeper point is that the domestic work assigned to women is not intellectually barren. It contains its own observations, experiments, and insights. Excluding women from philosophy does not protect philosophy; it impoverishes it.
"One can philosophise perfectly well while preparing supper."
— Reply to Sister Philothea, 1691
Sor Juana extends the argument begun with her remark about Aristotle. Philosophical thinking does not require a library, a laboratory, or a lecture hall. It can happen wherever a thinking person is present, including a kitchen. This challenges both the confinement of women to the domestic sphere (because their thought follows them there) and the separation of philosophy from everyday life (because philosophy is not a specialised professional activity but a human capacity). The remark is playful but the argument is serious and continues to be cited.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Cultural Heritage and Identity When exploring the literary and intellectual heritage of Latin America
How to introduce
Introduce Sor Juana as a central figure in Latin American literature and thought, often called the Tenth Muse by her contemporaries. Note that she wrote in multiple languages of her society — Spanish, Latin, Nahuatl, and Afro-Mexican creole — reflecting the complexity of colonial New Spain. Ask: what does it mean for a writer to work in multiple languages of a society? What does it make possible, and what are its limits given the power relations of a colonial society? Connect to Rigoberta Menchú and Pablo Neruda as later figures in the Latin American tradition.
Critical Thinking When discussing how to make an argument under pressure
How to introduce
Set the scene: a bishop has publicly rebuked Sor Juana, using a false female name, for engaging in secular studies. She cannot directly challenge his authority, but she cannot stay silent either. Read passages from her Reply, noting how she combines apparent deference with rigorous argument, vast learning, and controlled anger. Ask: when you need to make a difficult argument to someone with power over you, what strategies do you have? What is the difference between capitulating, attacking, and the approach Sor Juana takes? Where is the line between rhetoric and integrity?
Critical Thinking When examining double standards and moral reasoning
How to introduce
Work through Hombres necios stanza by stanza, identifying the specific double standards Sor Juana exposes. Ask: what makes a double standard morally wrong? Is it inconsistency? Injustice? Both? Then ask students to identify double standards in contemporary life — in their schools, communities, media, or politics. How would Sor Juana's method work on these contemporary examples? Connect to Simone de Beauvoir's later analysis of how women are placed in impossible positions by society's expectations.
Further Reading

Emilie Bergmann and Stacey Schlau's Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (2007, Modern Language Association) is a useful scholarly guide. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell's edition of the Reply (2009, Feminist Press) provides the text with careful annotation. Margo Glantz's Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: hagiografía o autobiografía? (1995, Grijalbo, in Spanish) is a foundational feminist reading. The Obras Completas (Fondo de Cultura Económica, four volumes) is the standard Spanish edition.

Key Ideas
1
Writing in the languages of colonial society
Sor Juana wrote not only in Spanish and Latin but in Nahuatl, the principal Indigenous language of central Mexico, and in the Afro-Mexican creole spoken by enslaved and free Black people of New Spain. Her villancicos, devotional songs performed in cathedrals, sometimes included voices speaking these other languages, representing the Indigenous and African populations of the colony. The representations reflect the prejudices of her society and are not straightforwardly celebratory, but the fact of inclusion is significant: she recognised the linguistic and cultural complexity of New Spain in writing intended for public performance. No other major poet of the Spanish Baroque did this.
2
The politics of the Reply to Sister Philothea
The Reply was written in response to a letter published by the bishop of Puebla under the name Sister Philothea, rebuking Sor Juana for her secular studies. The political context is crucial. The bishop was using a false female name, which itself was a sign of how inappropriate it was considered for a man to rebuke a nun in public. Sor Juana's response had to walk a careful line: she could not openly reject the church authority over her, but she could defend herself with rigorous argument, vast erudition, and carefully controlled indignation. Reading the Reply as a political document in a dangerous situation reveals its rhetorical sophistication alongside its philosophical content.
3
Silence as the final argument
In the last years of her life, Sor Juana stopped writing. She sold her library, signed penitential statements in her own blood, and devoted herself to religious observance until her death in the epidemic of 1695. Scholars have debated this ending for centuries. Was it a genuine religious conversion? A forced capitulation? A strategic withdrawal under pressure? Sor Juana herself left little explanation, and perhaps this silence is itself an argument: she had made her case as fully as she could in the Reply, and she would not go on defending herself. The silence of her final years is as eloquent as her writing, and no reading of her work can avoid engaging with it.
Key Quotations
"How can we doubt that a woman is capable of study, when women themselves have been the teachers of men?"
— Reply to Sister Philothea, 1691
Sor Juana supports her argument by reviewing a long list of learned women from Scripture, classical antiquity, the early Church, and her own era — queens, prophets, doctors of the Church, philosophers, writers. The rhetorical strategy is to shift the burden of proof: given that so many women have evidently been capable of learning and have taught others, the question is no longer whether women in general are capable but why particular women are denied opportunities. The list itself was an act of retrieval, remembering figures who had been forgotten or sidelined.
"I, the worst of all."
— Inscription in her own blood, 1694
In the last year of her life, Sor Juana signed a series of penitential statements, including one containing this phrase, reportedly written in her own blood. The words have troubled readers for centuries. Were they a sincere confession of religious unworthiness? A formulaic act required by her confessors? A last defiance expressed in a form acceptable to the church? The ambiguity is painful and probably deliberate. The phrase marks the moment at which her public writing ceased. Its starkness stands at the far end of her vast literary output as a final, unreadable statement.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Ethical Thinking When exploring the ambiguity of Sor Juana's final silence
How to introduce
Present the final years of Sor Juana's life: her sale of her library, her penitential statements, the inscription I, the worst of all reportedly written in her own blood, her silence, her death nursing her sisters through an epidemic. Explain that historians have interpreted these events very differently. Ask: how should we read this ending? Is it a betrayal of her earlier positions? A strategic survival? A genuine religious shift? A forced capitulation? Can we know? What are the ethics of interpreting a writer's final actions when she did not leave an explanation? Connect to how we read the final positions of other figures who changed their public stances under pressure.
Cultural Heritage and Identity When examining the limits of inclusion in colonial literature
How to introduce
Sor Juana included Indigenous and Afro-Mexican voices in her villancicos, making her almost unique in the Spanish Baroque. But the representations are shaped by the prejudices of her society and are not simply celebratory. Ask students to consider both sides. What does it mean that she wrote at all in Nahuatl and Afro-Mexican creole, when other writers of her class and position did not? What does it mean that her representations nonetheless reflected colonial hierarchies? Is a writer's inclusion of marginalised voices always a form of recognition, or can it also be a form of appropriation? How do you evaluate such complex cases? Connect to Anzaldúa on borderlands writing and to Lugones on coloniality.
Common Misconceptions
Common misconception

Sor Juana entered the convent because she had a strong religious calling.

→
What to teach instead

Sor Juana was quite open about her reasons, at least in retrospect. In the Reply she explained that she entered the convent because it was the only path available to her that did not require marriage and that allowed her to continue her studies. She respected religious life, took her vows seriously, and wrote extensive religious poetry, but she was clear that the main attraction was the opportunity to go on learning. Reading her vocation as primarily a love of knowledge, rather than a religious calling in the usual sense, is truer to what she herself said.

Common misconception

Sor Juana was a secular feminist hidden within a religious disguise.

→
What to teach instead

This reading anachronistically imposes later categories on her work. Sor Juana was a genuinely religious thinker who wrote within the Catholic tradition of her time, and her arguments for women's learning were developed in religious terms: women have the same souls, the same intellectual capacities given by God, the same duty to love the Creator through understanding creation. Separating her religion from her defence of women's learning would misunderstand both. She was a religious thinker who made feminist arguments, which is not the same as a feminist disguised as a religious thinker.

Common misconception

The Reply to Sister Philothea was published during Sor Juana's lifetime as a public intervention.

→
What to teach instead

The Reply was written in 1691 and circulated in manuscript but was not printed until 1700, five years after Sor Juana's death. During her lifetime it reached a select audience of readers in New Spain and Spain. The restricted circulation was itself significant: Sor Juana could not publish freely, and her writing had to find its readers through the networks of the church and the court. The Reply's status as a foundational text of feminist thought emerged over centuries as it was rediscovered, translated, and championed, rather than as an immediate public impact in her own time.

Common misconception

Sor Juana's work was forgotten until recently rediscovered by feminist scholars.

→
What to teach instead

Sor Juana was never forgotten. Her poetry was published in Spain in her lifetime and reprinted through the eighteenth century. She remained a revered figure in Mexican and Hispanic literary tradition, celebrated as one of the greatest writers of the Spanish language. What changed in the twentieth century, particularly through the work of Octavio Paz and feminist scholars such as Emilie Bergmann and Margo Glantz, was the scholarly and philosophical interpretation of her work. Feminist scholarship brought out dimensions that earlier readers had overlooked, but it did not rescue her from oblivion — she was already central to the canon she helped to form.

Intellectual Connections
Anticipates
Mary Wollstonecraft
Sor Juana's Reply, written in 1691, anticipates Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792 by a century. Both argued that women were intellectually equal to men and that the customs denying them education were unjust. Sor Juana argued from within a Catholic religious framework; Wollstonecraft argued from an Enlightenment framework of rights and reason. The different frameworks reached overlapping conclusions, showing that the argument for women's equal capacity for learning has emerged repeatedly in different cultures and periods when women have had the opportunity and courage to make it.
In Dialogue With
Simone de Beauvoir
De Beauvoir's analysis of how women are placed in impossible positions by the contradictions of patriarchal society is anticipated in Sor Juana's Hombres necios. Both examine how the very demands made on women — to be virtuous, available, pure, desirable — are structurally incompatible with each other, so that women are always wrong by some standard. De Beauvoir gave this analysis philosophical depth in The Second Sex; Sor Juana gave it poetic precision three centuries earlier. The continuity of the observation across such distance suggests something durable about the structure being observed.
In Dialogue With
Rigoberta Menchú
Sor Juana and Menchú are two foundational figures in the long tradition of women writing and speaking in the Americas, separated by three centuries but both deeply engaged with the linguistic and cultural complexity of their societies. Sor Juana wrote in the colonial languages of New Spain, including Indigenous and Afro-Mexican creole voices. Menchú bore witness as an Indigenous Maya woman to the violence of twentieth-century Guatemala. Together they represent the long arc of women's public voice in Latin America, from the colonial convent to the contemporary testimony.
In Dialogue With
Gloria Anzaldúa
Sor Juana's use of multiple languages and her position on the edges of different cultural worlds — Spanish and Indigenous, elite and popular, religious and secular — anticipates Anzaldúa's later theorisation of borderlands consciousness. Both wrote from and about the experience of moving between languages and cultural registers. Anzaldúa gave this experience a theoretical name; Sor Juana lived and wrote it in colonial Mexico. Reading them together reveals a long Latin American tradition of writing across borders that Anzaldúa helped to articulate.
In Dialogue With
María Lugones
Lugones's work on the coloniality of gender provides a framework for understanding Sor Juana's position in colonial New Spain. Lugones argues that colonialism did not simply impose gender hierarchies but reshaped the possibilities of being a woman in Indigenous and enslaved populations as well as in elite colonial society. Sor Juana wrote from a specific position within this colonial structure: a Creole woman of elite education, constrained by gender but privileged by race and class. Reading her through Lugones's framework reveals both the constraints she faced and the positions not available to other women in the same society.
Complements
Zera Yacob
Sor Juana and Zera Yacob were near-contemporaries, writing in the seventeenth century in very different parts of the world: Mexico and Ethiopia. Both defended the equal intellectual capacities of women, both developed their thought within religious frameworks while arguing against the misuse of religious authority, and both worked in languages — Ge'ez for Zera Yacob, Nahuatl and Afro-Mexican creole alongside Spanish for Sor Juana — that were not the dominant languages of the European scholarly world. Reading them together decentres the assumption that serious seventeenth-century philosophy happened only in Europe.
Further Reading

For the most detailed scholarly treatment

Octavio Paz's Sor Juana: Her Life and Her World (1988) remains the most substantial single study.

For the literary and cultural context

Asunción Lavrin's Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (2008, Stanford University Press) illuminates the world of colonial convents in which Sor Juana worked.

For Nahuatl and Afro-Mexican dimensions

Martha Lilia Tenorio's work on the villancicos and recent scholarship on Sor Juana's engagement with Indigenous and African voices. For the English-speaking reader, the Feminist Press's ongoing translations make new dimensions of her work accessible.