“I, THE WORST OF ALL”

“I don’t study to know more, but to ignore less.”
The speaker of this quote was born on 12th November, 1648, at a time when Mexico had been a Spanish colony for over a century, leading to a complex class system. Her name was Juana de Asbaje.
Juana’s grandparents were influential members of Mexico’s most esteemed class. However, Juana’s birth was illegitimate, and her father, a Spanish military captain by the name of Don Pedro Manuel de Asuaje, left her mother, Dona Isabel, to raise Juana and her sisters alone. Despite this, the family was guaranteed a comfortable position in society due to her grandfather’s influence and means.
Her mother, Dona Isabel, was a strong-willed woman who set an admirable precedent for her daughters to follow. Despite her illiteracy and the bias she faced, Dona Isabel successfully managed one of her father’s (Juana’s grandfather) two estates while raising Juana and her sisters. Perhaps it was her example that paved the way for Juana’s lifelong confidence.
Juana herself was a child of precocious intellect and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. As a child, she stole books from her grandfather’s private library and hid in her family’s hacienda chapel to read them, which was forbidden to girls at the time. At age three, she had mastered Latin. At age five, she could reportedly do accounts. By adolescence she had mastered Greek logic and philosophy, and at age 13, she had mastered the ancient Aztec language of Nahautl. By then, she was also teaching Latin to younger students. When she learned that higher education was only open to men, she begged her mother to let her attend university in disguise, but her pleas fell on deaf ears. Her request denied, Juana resigned herself to continue her studies privately.
News of her intelligence attracted attention from the Viceroy’s court in Mexico City, and at age 16, she was sent away to serve as a lady-in-waiting. Wanting to test the young woman’s intelligence, the Viceroy summoned a panel of prestigious scholars to test her with complicated question of mathematics and philosophy. She blew them away. Observers would later liken the scene to “a royal galleon fending off a few canoes.” The way she acquitted herself only served to add to her reputation.
In Mexico City, she was considered a prized treasure of the court. Her plays and poems shocked and dazzled the court in equal turns, especially her poem “You Foolish Men”.
“You foolish men who lay
the guilt on women,
not seeing you’re the cause
of the very thing you blame;
if you invite their disdain
with measureless desire
why wish they well behave
if you incite to ill.
You fight their stubbornness,
Then, weightily,
you say it was their lightness,
when it was your guile.” [excerpt]
The poem highlighted the double standards men posed on women, about how they thoughtlessly ruined women while blaming them of immorality. Despite the outrage and controversy her work caused, her accomplishments still garnered her fame throughout Spain. At court, Juana was an object of fervent admiration, and received numerous proposals. But marriage simply didn’t hold as much importance to Juana as knowledge.
In order to preserve her respectability and independence while remaining unmarried, Juana joined the Hieronymite Church of Santa Paula in 1669, at age 20, and adopted a new name: Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. In the years she spent at the church, she wrote copiously; everything from treatises on philosophy and mathematics, to dramas and comedies, to religious music and poetry, and amassed a massive library of over 4,000 books. She served as the convent’s treasurer and archivist, and used her influence to protect the livelihoods of many young women under her tutelage.
But her boldness eventually set her at odds with the church. In 1690, the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernandez, published Sor Juana’s private critique of a respected sermon under the pseudonym of Sor Filotea. Along with the critique, he also published his own letter, admonishing her to dedicate herself to religion instead of her studies. Bravely, she published her own letter in response, called Reply to Sor Filotea, in which she defended women’s rights to formal education. She believed that by putting older women in positions of authority, women could educate other women. Sor Juana’s place as a woman in a self-appointed position of authority was controversial according to the church, and she was repeatedly criticized for challenging the patriarchal structure of the Catholic Church.
Gradually, once-famous Sor Juana was relieved of her prestige and reputation, forced to sell her library, and by 1693, had seemingly given up writing to avoid risking official censure. Enraged, but unwilling to leave the church, she bitterly renewed her vows. In a last act of defiance, she signed them, “I, the worst of all,” in her own blood. With her right to writing taken away from her, Sor Juana spent the rest of her life in charity work, and on 17 April 1695, died from an illness she’d contracted while nursing her one of her sisters, at the age of 44.
Today, she is known as the first feminist of the Americas, and is the subject of several operas, plays, and novels, and appears on Mexico’s twenty-peso banknote.