Gender in Mexican Intellectual History Juana Inez Essay

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Gender in Mexican Intellectual History

Juana Inez Ramirez de Asbaje, also known as Juana Ines de la Cruz, was an amazing woman in both Latin American and world history. Here was a woman writing in the 17th century who was willing to discuss the sexual practices of the males around her and to criticize them. Being a nun, this was even more out of the ordinary and makes Asbaje an even more extraordinary figure. In the 1600s, a woman's place was at the home either as a servant or as a bearer of children to a proper husband. It was not proper for a female to be educated or to think. For many women who were born with an untimely and unfortunate intellect, the only venue for them to learn was by entering the church. In her "Response to Sor Filotea," she states that as a young girl, Asbaje asked her mother if she could be dressed as a young boy and secretly enter university so that she could study amongst intellectual equals (de Cruz 775). Nuns were the only women who were encouraged to learn to read, write, and to express themselves, but even that was within a limited capacity. At the time of her writings, Mexico was still a province of the Spanish empire. As a colony, the land was driven by laws that originated from across the Atlantic.

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During the period of her work in the late 1600s, the Spanish Inquisition was still going on in the homeland. Thus, it was an especially dangerous time for anyone, let alone a woman, to "think out loud." She could have been charged with heresy, excommunicated from the Catholic Church, tortured, or even executed for her outlandish thinking. The legacy of Juana Inez Ramirez de Asbaje has been carried throughout history by her writings.

She was born in modest circumstances. As the daughter of an unwed mother and thus labeled illegitimate, it was difficult for the young woman to receive the education and nurturing she so desperately needed and richly deserved. At the time, there was still a large social stigma attached to illegitimacy which limited her prospects as an adult. Although her mother was able to get her later siblings married off, the strange intellectual illegitimate daughter was not so easily placed in any kind of union. Juana had no dowry to speak of and already her abnormal ability to think and express herself had soured her reputation in the local community.

In the poem "Hombres Necios," Juana de Cruz (as she is most commonly referred to) defends womankind to an unseen, unnamed male. She makes an appeal to this other being that women are….....

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