Seventeenth-century Mexican intellectual, poet and nun. Education, knowledge, and a woman’s authority to have either.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) took vows in New Spain partly because a convent was the one place a woman could keep a library. She kept a famous one, along with instruments and maps, and wrote poetry, philosophy and drama that the court could not ignore.
In 1691 she wrote the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, a defence of a woman's right to study that is still the clearest thing anyone wrote on the subject in that century: she argues from scripture, from the church's own history, and from the plain fact of her own mind. The church authorities pressed her afterwards, and she gave up her books. That ending is usually told as tragedy. It is also evidence — nobody dismantles a library over an argument they think is weak.