Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Latin American · Latin America · 1651 to 1695

Mexican nun, poet and scholar who defended women's right to study and wrote boldly on knowledge and love.

What it is

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was a Mexican poet, dramatist, scholar and nun, regarded as one of the most important writers of the Latin American colonial period. Born Juana Ramirez de Asbaje, she died in Mexico City in 1695. Her birth year is given as 1651 or 1648, and scholars have not settled it.

She was largely self-taught. As a girl she gained a place at the viceroy's court, where scholars tested her knowledge, and in 1667 she entered convent life, which gave her time to study and write. She amassed one of the largest private libraries in the New World, and she is often called the first published feminist of the Americas.

The main ideas

Women's right to learn. In her Reply to Sister Filotea she defended herself and every woman's right to knowledge, listing learned women of the Bible, the classical world and her own time as models.
A quest for knowledge. Her long poem First Dream recounts the soul's attempt, in a night of dreaming, to gain total knowledge by following the philosophical paths of her day, and its failure and persistence.
Philosophy in daily life. She wrote that one can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper, meaning that thought is not tied to a particular place or station.
Study as part of faith. She justified the study of human arts and sciences as necessary for understanding sacred theology.

What it looks like in practice

Picture a young woman told by an authority that her proper place is in religious duty and not in study, who answers with a letter that sets out her own life, her reading and her right to think. Sor Juana's Reply is such a letter. This is an illustration of her situation, not a quotation.

Books and moments

First Dream is her long philosophical poem on the soul and knowledge.
Reply to Sister Filotea (1691) is her prose defence of her studies and of women's education.
The Divine Narcissus is one of her religious plays in verse.

Questions and criticism

Is she a feminist? She is called the first published feminist of the New World, yet the term is modern and she lived and wrote within the religious frame of her time.
Why did she stop writing? After the bishop of Puebla published her critique of a sermon and admonished her to turn to religious studies, her protected position collapsed, and the reasons for her later silence are discussed.
How much was philosophy? Her philosophical thought is found in poems and letters, not treatises, and how to read it is debated.

Close neighbours

She wrote in the tradition of Spanish Baroque poetry and drew on classical, biblical and philosophical sources. The page on Aristotle shows one of the philosophers whose thought was part of her education.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

Augustine of Hippo · Sor Juana cites Augustine among the church authorities in defence of her learning. (scholars disagree about this link)

Runs parallel to

Mary Wollstonecraft · Both defended women's right to learning in the face of church and social opposition. (scholars disagree about this link)
Simone de Beauvoir · Both saw women's confinement as a matter of social arrangement and not of nature. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Latin American thinkers

Bartolome de las Casas · 1484 to 1566
Jose Carlos Mariategui · 1894 to 1930
Leopoldo Zea · 1912 to 2004
Paulo Freire · 1921 to 1997
Enrique Dussel · 1934 to 2023

Sources we used

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz · Encyclopaedia Britannica, read on 9 October 2026
Juana Ines de la Cruz · Wikipedia, read on 9 October 2026