Sor Juana has become a beloved figure in México, revered as a ground-breaker, and her image appeared for many years on the 200 peso bill. Scholars today consider Sor Juana a “proto-feminist,” for both her defense of women’s intellectual capacities and her work legitimizing qualities traditionally dismissed as feminine. She made no effort to masculinize her voice and still expected readers to take her seriously.

Male intellectuals of Sor Juana's time separated mind from body. She saw physical activity and thought as connected. One example: Sor Juana reframed cooking, something seen as feminine and distinctly un-intellectual, as a philosophical practice. She treated cooking as a science that kept her intellectually engaged. As she once coyly noted: “Had Aristotle cooked, he would have written a great deal more.” Sor Juana’s brilliance, her life and work suggests, came not in spite of her gender, but in many ways because of it. She passed in 1695, but her writing still speaks to us. We share two excerpts here.

From You Foolish Men

You foolish men who lay

the guilt on women,

not seeing you're the cause

of the very thing you blame;

What kind of mind is odder

than his who mists

a mirror and then complains

that it's not clear.

No woman wins esteem of you:

the most modest is ungrateful

if she refuses to admit you;

yet if she does, she's loose.

You always are so foolish

your censure is unfair;

one you blame for cruelty,

the other for being easy.

Who is more to blame,

though either should do wrong?

She who sins for pay

or he who pays to sin?

From Respuesta a Sor Filotea

Who has forbidden women to engage in private and individual studies? Have they not a rational soul as men do? ...I have this inclination to study and if it is evil, I am not the one who formed me thus — I was born with it and with it I shall die.