Title: Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz Author: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Creation Date: 1691 (published 1700) Location: Mexico City, New Spain Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
In March 1691, from within the Jeronymite convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City, a nun composed a forty-page letter that would become the founding feminist text of the Americas. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was answering "Sor Filotea de la Cruz" — a pseudonym adopted by Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, Bishop of Puebla, who in late 1690 had published without permission Sor Juana's private theological critique of a sermon by the Jesuit António Vieira, and appended a letter rebuking her for secular learning and urging her to confine herself to devotional writing. The Respuesta is her reply: autobiography, literary argument, scriptural exegesis, and sustained defence of women's intellectual life, all conducted from inside a rhetorical frame of humility so carefully constructed that four centuries of readers have not agreed on where the deference ends and the defiance begins.
Juana Inés de Asbaje was born around 1648–51 in San Miguel Nepantla, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish captain and a Creole woman. She taught herself to read by following an elder sister to village lessons, was famously examined as a teenager before forty scholars at the viceregal court, and entered the convent in 1669 — partly because it was the only institution available to educated women of her rank. Inside San Jerónimo she accumulated a library of four thousand volumes, wrote poetry, drama, and philosophy, and became the most celebrated writer in the Spanish Empire. The Respuesta was written at the closing of that life — a defence that knew it might not succeed, composed with the full intellectual apparatus of a mind that had spent decades studying the very tradition now being used against it. It was not published until 1700, four years after her death, in Madrid.
The Prohibition
The prohibition was architectural rather than statutory. No single decree forbade women of New Spain from reading; instead, a lattice of overlapping constraints — familial, economic, ecclesiastical, educational — ensured that sustained intellectual life was almost inconceivable for a woman. The University of Mexico admitted no women. Latin, the language of theology, philosophy, and canon law, was taught almost exclusively to boys destined for the priesthood. Sor Juana recounts in the Respuesta that she once begged her mother to let her dress as a boy and attend the University — a request refused as unthinkable.
The ecclesiastical dimension tightened the constraint further. The Pauline injunction that women should keep silence in church had been interpreted as a general prohibition on women teaching doctrine. Nuns could read devotional works and compose spiritual autobiographies under a confessor's supervision, but the formal theological disciplines — scripture, dogmatics, canon law — were reserved to men. The Mexican Inquisition, active since 1571, watched women's religious writing with particular suspicion after the alumbrada scandals; any nun who claimed authority beyond the devotional risked investigation.
Sor Juana was also illegitimate, a fact that under canon law barred her from certain privileges and made her position in the convent socially precarious. Her very productivity compounded the danger. By 1690 she had written plays for the viceregal court, villancicos sung in cathedrals, love poems, and the philosophical lyric Primero sueño. When the bishop published her Carta Atenagórica without permission, he dragged her theological ambition into public view. The pseudonymous letter that followed was a warning disguised as sisterly counsel: withdraw, or worse may come.
The Strategy
Sor Juana's strategy was rhetorical ju-jitsu. She accepted the formal posture of humility — calling herself unworthy, ignorant, the least of God's servants — and used that posture as the platform from which to say, at extraordinary length and precision, the opposite of what humility would imply. She was writing to a bishop who had the power to silence her, and directness would have ended the conversation before it began. By accepting the frame of deference, she created the space to argue within it.
Her first move was autobiographical. Rather than debating scripture in the abstract, she told the story of her own mind — the self-instruction in her grandfather's library, the childhood vow to cut her hair if she had not mastered a subject by the time it grew back, the refusal to eat cheese because she was told it dulled the intellect. The effect reframed the question entirely: the bishop had written as though learning were a choice a pious woman should decline; Sor Juana replied by showing her learning was constitutive, present from birth, and that to forbid it would be to forbid her God-given nature.
Her second move was scriptural. She matched the bishop text for text, marshalling the learned women of Hebrew scripture, the women disciples and early martyrs, the abbesses the church fathers had praised. The tradition, read carefully, did not prohibit women's learning; the prohibition was a later cultural accretion. Her third move disassembled the Pauline injunction: the prohibition concerned public ecclesiastical authority, not private study. Her fourth, threaded throughout, grounded the argument in the particular — cooking observations, the geometry of spinning tops, her inability to stop thinking even when forbidden books.
The Price and the Legacy
The price was almost total. By late 1693, under pressure from her confessor and the broader ecclesiastical environment — compounded by famine, a grain riot in Mexico City in 1692, and accusations that the viceregal court's literary culture had displeased God — Sor Juana sold her library of four thousand volumes, her scientific and musical instruments, and most of what she had gathered over decades. She renewed her vows in 1694, signed, by one tradition, in her own blood: Yo, la peor del mundo — I, the worst in the world. She devoted her remaining months to nursing the sick, contracted the epidemic disease herself, and died on 17 April 1695, aged forty-three or forty-six.
The legacy has grown with every generation. The Respuesta was largely forgotten through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, recovered in the twentieth through the editions of Méndez Plancarte and Alatorre. Octavio Paz's 1982 study Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith argued for her centrality to the baroque, to colonial Latin American literature, and to women's intellectual history. Her face appears on the Mexican 200-peso note. The convent of San Jerónimo is now a university bearing her name.
But the truest measure of the legacy is this: the argument she made was lost in its own moment and survived as a written thing to outlast every institution that silenced her. The door she argued for and was forced to walk away from has been walked through by everyone who followed. The Respuesta is taught as the founding text of Latin American feminism — proof that the restriction was always arbitrary, that intelligence has no sex, and that she was right.
The Reading
The Posture of Humility
Your favour, most illustrious lady, was received with a gratitude that my pen cannot express in adequate terms, for the magnitude of such kindness has so overwhelmed my understanding that I find myself unable to respond in a manner befitting the honour you have done me. The unmerited publication of my private letter — a thing I wrote for my own exercise, with no ambition that it should pass beyond the hands of the person who prompted it — has left me not only speechless but, if I may say it plainly, afraid. Not afraid of the letter's contents, for I wrote nothing in it that I believed to be untrue, but afraid of the world's judgement upon a woman who has dared, even privately, to examine a theological question reserved by custom — though not, I shall argue, by scripture — to men.
I have delayed my reply these many weeks, and the delay itself requires explanation. It was not indifference that kept my pen still, nor was it ingratitude for the generous correction you offered. It was, if I am to be honest — and I must be honest, since dissimulation would dishonour the gift of your attention — the weight of the very compliment implied in your letter. For you wrote to me as though my learning were a real thing, worth addressing and correcting, and the shock of being taken seriously was itself silencing. I have spent so many years being told that my studies are vanity, distraction, and the wrong use of a woman's time, that to be rebuked for the substance of what I have written rather than for the mere act of writing was, paradoxically, the highest form of recognition I have received.
The Child Who Could Not Stop
Let me tell you, then, how this inclination began in me, since you have asked me to account for myself. I was not yet three years old when my mother sent an elder sister to the village school, and I, following her out of love and mischief rather than any conscious design, watched the lesson given and asked the teacher to instruct me as well. She did so, I believe, to amuse herself, but the lesson took root. When my mother later learned that her youngest could read, she was startled, for no one had authorised the instruction. I had already entered the country of letters, and I had entered without permission.
At six or seven I heard that there was a University in Mexico City where the sciences were studied, and I begged my mother — with the urgency only a child can sustain — to let me dress in boy's clothing and attend. The request was refused as unthinkable, as something not even worth the breath of refusal, and I cannot blame her. The world she lived in had not imagined a woman at the University, and what the imagination cannot hold, the will cannot pursue. I accepted the refusal, but the desire did not accept it. The desire had its own life, its own grammar, and it did not consult my circumstances before growing.
I read everything in my grandfather's library at the hacienda in the shadow of Popocatépetl. I read without guidance, without system, without anyone to tell me which books were proper for a girl and which were not. There was no teacher to impose a curriculum, so the world was my curriculum, and the library, disordered and generous, gave itself to me without conditions. I taught myself Latin. I cut my hair — a vow I made to myself that if I had not mastered a certain subject by the time my hair grew to a certain length, I would cut it again, since it seemed wrong for a head so bare of knowledge to be adorned with hair. And I did not eat cheese, because someone had told me it made the intellect dull. This information was probably wrong, but I acted upon it with the seriousness of one who had no teachers and therefore treated every scrap of learning-lore as though it might be the key.
The Convent as Strategy
I entered the convent, and let me be frank about why. The decision was not primarily religious vocation, though I do not despise religious vocation, nor have I failed, I think, to honour the obligations it imposes. I tried the Carmelites first, in 1667, and left after a few months because their rule was too severe for my health. When I entered the Jeronymites at San Jerónimo two years later, the reasoning was this: the convent was the only institution available to a woman of my social position that offered any realistic possibility of sustained intellectual life without the interruptions of marriage and childbearing. I chose the least disagreeable option. I chose it with my eyes open. I chose it knowing that even this imperfect shelter would have its costs.
And it did. Inside the convent my enemies were numerous. Other nuns felt my reading was vanity or distraction. Superiors assigned me responsibilities designed to curtail my study time. A particular prelate — I shall not name him, for charity and prudence forbid it — once forbade me to read for three months. Three months without books. I obeyed. But I could not obey with my mind. Even while forbidden to read, I studied the world with my eyes. I observed the pattern of the rafters in the refectory and found geometry in them. I watched the behaviour of eggs under heat in the kitchen and found natural philosophy. I noticed the geometry of children's spinning tops in the convent courtyard and found mathematics describing itself in play. Even while I slept, the processes of my intellect went on working, and I believe I have learned more in those hours of forced leisure than in all my years of reading. The mind that God has given me does not know how to stop. To forbid it from thinking would be to forbid it from being what it was made to be.
The Women of Scripture
You have invoked scripture against me, and I accept the field of battle. Let us read scripture together and see what it says.
Consider Deborah, who judged Israel and led armies. Consider Judith, who delivered her people through wisdom and courage. Consider Esther, whose intelligence saved her nation from destruction. Consider Abigail, whose words tempered David's anger and whose wisdom scripture does not merely record but praises. These were not women who sat silent while men governed. They governed, judged, fought, reasoned, and spoke, and the tradition that claims to draw its authority from scripture has included their stories in the very book it uses to silence women.
Consider the women of the Gospels. Who spoke first of the resurrection? Women. Who were named among Paul's own companions and correspondents? Women. Who were the early martyrs whose theological literacy is recorded in the accounts of their sufferings? Women, many of them, who debated their persecutors on doctrine and won the argument, if not the judgement. Consider the abbesses of the Latin tradition, the women the church fathers praised for learning, the scholars whose education was not merely tolerated but celebrated.
The tradition, read carefully, does not prohibit women's learning. The prohibition is a later addition, imposed by men who have confused cultural preference with theological principle. Saint Jerome taught women. Saint Augustine corresponded with them on matters of doctrine. The prohibition lies not in the sources but in the accretion of centuries of practice misread as law.
And now to the specific injunction. Paul wrote that women should keep silence in church, and this has been taken as a general prohibition. But what did he mean? He was addressing a specific congregation in a specific situation where disorder had arisen from unqualified public speech. The prohibition concerns public ecclesiastical authority in particular social contexts, not private study, not writing, not the interior life of the mind. There is a crucial distinction — one that the careless reader collapses — between estudiar, escribir, and enseñar: studying, writing, and teaching publicly. I do the first two. I have never claimed the third. And if the church already entrusts women religious with the catechesis of novices and the instruction of the young — which it does, routinely and without scandal — then it cannot possibly be arguing that women should teach without first learning. The argument contradicts itself.
The Kitchen and the Laboratory
If Aristotle had done the cooking, he would have written a great deal more.
I say this not as a joke, though it may be taken as one, but as an observation grounded in daily experience. I have spent years in the kitchen of this convent, and I have watched what happens to eggs when they are fried and when they are beaten. I have observed how sugar crystallises as it cools, how various liquids behave under heat, how a yolk and a white respond differently to the same application of fire. These are not trivial observations. They are the observations of natural philosophy, made by a woman who was not permitted to call herself a natural philosopher but who could not stop her eyes from seeing what was before them.
The great male philosophers theorised about the natural world from their studies and their academies. They wrote learnedly about substances, transformations, the behaviour of matter under various conditions. Meanwhile, women confined to domestic labour actually worked within the material world every day, handling the very substances the philosophers theorised about, and the philosophical tradition's loss of that knowledge is the tradition's impoverishment, not the women's. I will not grant the kitchen the low cultural status assigned to it. The kitchen is a laboratory. Women have been doing natural philosophy there without the title, without the recognition, and without the language to name what they were doing as knowledge.
And this is the deeper point, the one I wish my critics would hear. Theology cannot be adequately pursued without the secular arts. To understand scripture, one must understand history, geography, languages, and cosmology. To understand the liturgy, one must understand music and poetry. To understand the sacraments, one must understand the physical substances through which they operate. I have moved from one discipline to another not from caprice but because each opened onto the next: arithmetic led to music, music to the theory of proportion, proportion to geometry, geometry to astronomy, astronomy to theology. The whole of creation is linked by chains of learning, and theology alone cannot hold the chain without its servants. A theologian who has not learned the secular arts is an inferior theologian, regardless of sex.
The Texture of Envy
There is a particular hostility directed at intelligence in a woman, and it is different in texture from the hostility directed at an intelligent man. A man who excels draws competitors who wish to surpass him. A woman who excels draws people who wish to see her fail on principle, because her excelling is a category error in the world they have organised. Her success is not a challenge to be met but a disorder to be corrected.
I have experienced this in full measure. I have been told that my gift is dangerous to my soul — told by people who do not share the gift and therefore cannot understand it, who perceive intellectual desire as a form of vanity because they have never felt it as I feel it, which is to say as constitutive, as present as breathing, as much a property of my nature as the shape of my face. To be told that the thing you were born with is the thing that endangers you, by people who mean it as charity, is one of the most exquisite forms of pressure that a religious community can exert.
I have been resented not for any specific error in my theology but for the fact of my existence — a woman who has read too much and written too well, who has been celebrated by viceregal patrons, who has corresponded with European scholars, who has published. And the critique of Vieira that brought this storm upon me was a private exercise, written for my own study and the amusement of the person who requested it. I never sought its publication. The bishop published it without my permission and then rebuked me for its contents. I name this gently, for I owe you deference, and I name it precisely, so that no reader can mistake what has happened.
The Defence of Poetry
My secular verse has attracted particular criticism — the love sonnets, the villancicos, the court poetry — as though such writing were unworthy of a nun. To this I reply: the Psalms are poems. The Song of Songs is poetry of such erotic intensity that commentators have laboured for centuries to allegorise it into safety. The Hebrew prophets wrote in verse. Is poetry as such suspect, or is only women's poetry suspect?
Male poets, including clerics in good standing, have written verse far more erotic than anything I have composed, and the difference in treatment is not about the poems but about the sex of the poet. Let my critics examine their own libraries before they examine mine, and let them explain why the same forms that bring honour to a male cleric bring scandal to a female religious.
The Letter Within the Letter
I am aware of what I am doing. I am writing a letter answering a letter that was itself a letter from a sister nun — except that the sister nun was a bishop in disguise, and I know this, and he knows that I know. I address "Sor Filotea" as though she really existed, maintain the fiction that my recipient is a loving sister offering spiritual correction, and use this fiction to say things to a bishop that could not be said directly. The form is Pauline — the epistolary tradition of Paul's letters to the early Christian communities is the ultimate model for any Catholic letter of spiritual exhortation — and I am fully aware of the echo. I place my defence in the form of a Pauline epistle while arguing, in substance, against the Pauline injunction that has been used to silence women for sixteen hundred years.
The form contains the counter-argument and authorises the counter-argument at the same time. I have spent my life inside this tradition and I know exactly which of its conventions can be turned against its current enforcers.
The Submission
I submit myself to your correction. I acknowledge that I have perhaps occupied myself too freely with secular learning. I promise better devotion.
Whether I mean this as genuine recantation or as the necessary performance of defeat before an ecclesiastical authority I cannot overcome, I leave to readers more distant from this moment than I am. I have argued as well as I am able. I have marshalled every text, every precedent, every observation from kitchen and convent and library, every thread of the tradition that supports the thing I believe: that the right to know belongs to anyone born with a mind capable of knowing, which is to say everyone, which is to say that the restriction was always arbitrary.
I have said what I came to say. The rest belongs to God, and to whatever readers find these pages after I am done with them.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
Editions
 The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition) Feminist Press · Arenal & Powell The bilingual scholarly standard. Includes Sor Filotea's original letter, fresh translations, and an updated critical apparatus — the indispensable edition for serious readers. |
 Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings Penguin Classics · Peden & Stavans A bilingual selected works including the Respuesta, major poems, and the First Dream — the most accessible entry point, with a superb introduction by Ilan Stavans. |
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works Norton Critical Edition · Grossman & More The academic edition. Includes the Respuesta alongside critical essays by Octavio Paz and others, explanatory footnotes, and related writings by Ovid and Saint Teresa of Ávila. |
Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.