Title: Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (The Answer / La Respuesta) Author: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Creation Date: 1691 Location: New Spain (Mexico)
Summary
In 1690, the Bishop of Puebla, writing under the female pseudonym "Sor Filotea," published a private theological letter by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz alongside his own admonition that she abandon intellectual pursuits and devote herself to prayer. Sor Juana's response — La Respuesta — is one of the most extraordinary documents in the history of women's writing. In it, she mounts a passionate, erudite, and devastatingly logical defence of women's right to study, think, write, and teach. She traces her own insatiable hunger for knowledge from childhood, explains that the convent offered the least restrictive life available to a woman who needed books and study, and systematically demolishes every theological and philosophical argument used to bar women from intellectual life. The letter is at once an autobiography, a feminist manifesto, and a virtuoso display of the very learning her critics sought to suppress.
Why This Book Matters
Written more than a century before Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Sor Juana's Respuesta is the earliest major feminist text in the Americas and one of the earliest anywhere. Its significance is enormous. Here was a woman in a colonial society governed by the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church — two of the most patriarchal institutions in the early modern world — who dared to assert not merely her own right to think but the right of all women to intellectual life. She did so not as a secular radical but from within the religious establishment, using the Church's own texts and traditions against its enforcers. After the letter, and under intense pressure, she surrendered her library of four thousand volumes and her scientific instruments, signed a renewed vow in her own blood, and fell silent. She died in 1695 during a plague. Her Respuesta survived as a testament to what patriarchal power destroys and what it cannot entirely suppress.
Historical Context
Sor Juana lived in the Viceroyalty of New Spain during the late seventeenth century, a rigidly hierarchical colonial society in which the Catholic Church controlled education, publishing, and intellectual life. Women had almost no access to formal learning; Sor Juana entered the Hieronymite convent in 1669 specifically to gain access to books and intellectual community. She became the most celebrated poet and intellectual in the Spanish-speaking world, enjoying the patronage of two successive vicereines. But her fame made her a target. The Bishop of Puebla's "Sor Filotea" letter was the opening move in a campaign by Church authorities to silence her. The Respuesta was her final public act of defiance.
Literary Significance
The Respuesta is a masterclass in rhetorical strategy. Sor Juana employs a pose of humility — "I, the most unworthy" — that barely conceals the ferocity of her argument. She marshals an astonishing range of classical, biblical, and patristic sources, demonstrating the very erudition her critics condemn. Her prose moves between irony and passion, legal argument and personal testimony, creating a text that is simultaneously a letter, a legal defence, an autobiography, and a philosophical treatise. The work established a tradition of Latin American feminist writing that continues through Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska, and contemporary writers.
Research Notes
Flagged by the social-upheaval analyst as the foundational text of women's resistance writing in the Americas. Latin American civilisation scholars may include Sor Juana's poetry but overlook the Respuesta, which is her most politically significant work. European feminist scholars typically begin their genealogy with Wollstonecraft (1792), missing Sor Juana's text by a full century. This is a critical gap: the Respuesta demonstrates that the struggle for women's intellectual freedom was not an Enlightenment invention but had deep roots in colonial Latin America, within the very heart of the Catholic Church.
The Reading
The letter begins, as all letters from nuns must begin, with humility. "Most illustrious Lady, my Lady," Sor Juana writes, and immediately the reader senses the tension coiled inside that conventional address, because the "illustrious Lady" to whom she writes is no lady at all. It is Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz, the Bishop of Puebla, who has hidden behind the female pseudonym "Sor Filotea de la Cruz" to deliver his admonition — that she, Juana Ines de la Cruz, the most celebrated intellect in New Spain, should put down her pen, close her books, and devote herself to the only pursuit proper to a woman of the cloth: silent prayer.
Sor Juana knows exactly who she is writing to. She knows the bishop's letter was a trap dressed as a kindness. He had taken a private theological critique she had written — a brilliant analysis challenging a famous sermon by the Jesuit Antonio Vieira — and published it without her permission, appending his own patronising counsel that she turn her considerable gifts away from secular and theological scholarship and toward "the imitation of Christ." The publication was designed to expose her to exactly the kind of censure she now faces. The bishop's pseudonym, the feminine disguise, only sharpens the irony: a man telling a woman to be silent while pretending to be a woman himself.
And so Sor Juana writes back. What follows is one of the most remarkable documents in the history of Western letters — a text that is simultaneously an autobiography, a legal defence, a feminist treatise, a theological argument, and an act of defiance so controlled and so devastating that it reads, more than three centuries later, as though the ink is still wet.
She begins with a long, elaborately humble disclaimer. She is unworthy. She has delayed her response not from disrespect but from an inability to find words adequate to the bishop's graciousness. She is "the most unworthy" of correspondents. Her pen trembles. She fears to give offence.
None of this is true, and both she and the bishop know it. The humility is a rhetorical strategy as old as Cicero — the captatio benevolentiae, the capturing of goodwill — deployed with exquisite precision. Sor Juana is arming herself. Every self-deprecating phrase is a shield that will allow the blade behind it to strike more freely. If she has declared herself humble, unworthy, trembling, then nothing she says afterward can be attributed to pride. She has preemptively disarmed the charge of arrogance that she knows will come.
Then she turns to her life, and the letter transforms into something extraordinary: the intellectual autobiography of a woman for whom knowledge was not a luxury but a biological necessity, as essential as breathing.
She was born Juana Ines de Asbaje y Ramirez in 1648 (or perhaps 1651 — she was uncertain of the date herself) in a small village near Mexico City. She was illegitimate, the daughter of a Creole mother and a Spanish father who disappeared. She could read by the age of three, having followed her older sister to lessons and begged the teacher to instruct her. When she learned that the university in Mexico City — the Royal and Pontifical University — did not admit women, she begged her mother to dress her as a boy and send her anyway. Her mother refused. "And I was right to be denied," Sor Juana writes, with an irony so delicate it almost evaporates on the page.
She taught herself. She devoured every book in her grandfather's library. She imposed punishments on herself for slow learning — cutting her hair short, reasoning that "there was no sense in a head being adorned with hair and naked of knowledge, which was the more desirable ornament." She studied Latin and mastered it in fewer than twenty lessons. She studied logic, rhetoric, physics, music, arithmetic, geometry, architecture. She read the Church Fathers. She read secular philosophy. She read everything.
At sixteen, she was presented at the viceregal court in Mexico City, where the Viceroy and his wife were so astonished by her learning that they assembled a panel of forty scholars — theologians, philosophers, mathematicians, poets — to examine her. She answered every question. She demolished every challenge. The Viceroy's wife, the Marquise de Mancera, became her patron and protector.
But Sor Juana was a woman in seventeenth-century New Spain, and the question of what to do with a woman of her gifts had no good answer. Marriage would have consumed her in domestic obligation. Remaining at court offered intellectual companionship but no security. The convent — and only the convent — offered a woman access to books, solitude, and a room of her own. Sor Juana entered the Hieronymite convent of San Jeronimo in 1669, not from religious vocation but from intellectual necessity. "And so I entered the religious life," she writes, "knowing that it entailed certain conditions... most repugnant to my nature; but given the total antipathy I felt for marriage, I deemed convent life the least unsuitable and the most honorable I could elect."
This is an extraordinary admission. She is telling the Bishop of Puebla — a prince of the Church — that she became a nun not because she loved God more than the world but because the cloister was the only institution that allowed a woman to think. The honesty is breathtaking, and the bishop, reading these words, must have felt the ground shift beneath his feet.
Inside the convent, Sor Juana assembled a library of four thousand volumes — one of the largest private libraries in the Americas. She collected scientific and musical instruments. She conducted experiments. She wrote poetry — love poetry, philosophical poetry, satirical poetry — that made her the most famous writer in the Spanish-speaking world. She wrote plays that were performed in the viceregal court. She wrote theological treatises. She corresponded with scholars across the empire.
And she was watched. The Church authorities in New Spain — the Archbishop of Mexico, Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas, a notorious misogynist who refused to allow women in his presence — viewed her fame with growing alarm. A woman who wrote love poetry. A woman who studied secular philosophy. A woman who dared to critique a sermon by a Jesuit. This was not merely improper; it was dangerous. It suggested that a woman could think independently, that a woman's mind was the equal of a man's, that the intellectual hierarchy on which the entire social order depended was built on sand.
The bishop's "Sor Filotea" letter was the opening salvo of their campaign to silence her. And now, in her response, Sor Juana meets the attack head-on — though the weaponry she employs is so subtle, so layered with deference and erudition, that the blade enters before the target feels the cut.
She addresses the bishop's central claim: that women should not study, that learning is inappropriate to the female sex, that she should confine herself to prayer. And she annihilates it.
She begins with scripture. Did not the prophetess Deborah judge Israel? Did not Queen Esther save her people through wisdom? Did not the Virgin Mary herself, at the Annunciation, demonstrate theological understanding that exceeded that of the apostles? Sor Juana marshals example after example — from the Bible, from the Church Fathers, from the lives of the saints — of women whose learning was not merely tolerated but celebrated by the Church. Saint Paula, Saint Marcella, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Hypatia of Alexandria. She moves through the Fathers: Saint Jerome, who praised learned women; Saint Augustine, who corresponded with them; Saint Paul, whose injunction that women should "keep silence in the churches" she dismantles with devastating philological precision, arguing that it referred to a specific historical situation and was never meant as a universal prohibition.
"Let women keep silence in the churches," she quotes. "For it is not permitted unto them to speak." But what does this silence mean? Does it prohibit all learning, all writing, all thought? If so, then why did the Church celebrate so many learned women? If Saint Jerome could teach women theology, why could a woman not teach herself? The prohibition, Sor Juana argues, applies to public preaching — a specific clerical function — and not to the private study of letters, which is not merely permitted but commanded by the Church's own tradition.
She is using the Church's weapons against the Church. Every citation is impeccable. Every argument is grounded in authority that her accusers cannot challenge without challenging the foundations of their own faith. It is a masterpiece of rhetorical judo — the art of using your opponent's strength against him.
Then she moves from theology to philosophy, and her argument grows bolder. Knowledge, she insists, is not gendered. The truths of logic, mathematics, and natural philosophy are truths regardless of who discovers them. "One can perfectly well philosophise while cooking supper," she writes, in one of the letter's most famous passages. She describes her own experience of finding intellectual material in the most mundane domestic activities — observing the properties of eggs while frying them, noticing the geometry of a spinning top, deducing the principles of acoustics in the convent's vaulted chapel. If women are confined to the kitchen, she implies, then the kitchen itself becomes a laboratory. You cannot imprison a mind by imprisoning a body.
She recounts the obstacles she has faced — not from her own limitations but from the jealousy and fear of others. She has been denounced from pulpits. She has been ordered to stop writing. She has been told that her intellect is a danger to her soul. At one point, a "very saintly and ingenuous" prelate commanded that she cease her studies. She obeyed, she says — she stopped reading books. But she could not stop thinking. She observed the geometry of the convent's architecture. She analysed the physics of a spinning top. She watched two girls playing with a top and derived the principles of its motion. "Even deprived of books," she writes, "I could not stop the workings of my mind."
This passage is devastating in its implications. The bishop has told her to stop studying. She is telling him, with perfect courtesy, that this is impossible. You might as well tell the heart to stop beating. The desire for knowledge is not a choice; it is a constitution of her being, placed there by God Himself. To demand that she stop learning is to demand that she cease to be the creature God made her. It is, she implies without quite saying it, a blasphemy.
She turns, finally, to the specific occasion of the bishop's letter — the publication of her critique of Vieira's sermon. She did not seek publication. She wrote the critique in private, at the request of a friend. The bishop himself chose to publish it. Why, then, is she being censured for a text she never intended for the public eye? The injustice is pointed but never quite stated directly. Sor Juana lets the facts speak.
And then, in the letter's most revealing passage, she addresses the real issue — not theology, not scripture, not the propriety of women's learning, but envy. "What has not been the subject of my persecution?" she asks, and the pose of humility falls away entirely. She has been attacked not because she is wrong but because she is exceptional, and her excellence shames those who lack it. She is a woman who thinks better than the men who presume to judge her, and this is her unforgivable sin.
"If the light of my intellect — such as it is — were my own creation, one might justly blame me for it. But if it is a gift from God, why should I be persecuted for receiving it? Is the rich woman censured for her wealth? Is the beautiful woman punished for her beauty? Then why am I condemned for my understanding?"
The argument is unanswerable, and the bishop must have known it. He had tangled with the wrong woman.
The letter ends as it began, with humility — but a humility now so transparently strategic that it functions as its opposite. She begs the bishop's forgiveness for her boldness. She offers herself as his obedient servant. She hopes he will not think her insolent.
But the letter had already done its work. It had laid out, with irrefutable logic and devastating erudition, the case for women's intellectual freedom — a case that no one in the Americas, and few in Europe, had ever articulated with such force. It had exposed the mechanisms of patriarchal suppression — the pseudonyms, the false humility, the weaponisation of scripture — with surgical precision. And it had declared, in language that the bishop could not censure without revealing his own bad faith, that Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz would not be silenced.
Except that she was.
Within two years of writing the Respuesta, under relentless pressure from the Archbishop and other Church authorities, Sor Juana surrendered. She sold her library — four thousand volumes, the labour and love of a lifetime. She gave away her scientific and musical instruments. She signed a renewed statement of faith in her own blood: "I, the worst of all." She stopped writing. She devoted herself to nursing the sick during a plague that swept through the convent.
She died on April 17, 1695, at the age of forty-three (or forty-six). She had been silent for two years.
The Respuesta survived. It was copied, circulated, and eventually published. It crossed the ocean. It entered the bloodstream of Latin American intellectual life, where it has never stopped circulating. Three centuries before the word "feminism" existed, a nun in Mexico City had written its foundational text — not as abstract theory but as lived testimony, wrung from the specific, unbearable experience of being a woman of genius in a world that could not tolerate her existence.
"I, the worst of all," she had signed. But the Respuesta says otherwise. It says: I am the best of you. I have read more, thought harder, written more beautifully, and argued more precisely than any of you. And you know it. And that is why you want me to stop.
She stopped. The letter did not.
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The standard scholarly edition in English is the bilingual translation by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell, published by The Feminist Press. The expanded edition (2009) includes Sor Filotea's letter — the bishop's provocative pseudonymous admonition — alongside fresh translations and an updated scholarly apparatus.
Translated by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. The expanded bilingual edition — includes Sor Filotea's letter, fresh translations, and 37 pages of notes illuminating Sor Juana's extraordinary range of allusions.
Translated by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. The original Feminist Press edition — complete introduction, bibliography, and chronology with Spanish and English texts.
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