- Lived:
- 1648–1695 · New Spain (colonial Mexico): Nepantla, Mexico City, and the convent of San Jerónimo
- Tradition:
- Baroque New World scholasticism — poet, theologian, and the first great voice for women's right to learn in the Americas
- The Big Idea:
- The hunger to know is planted by God in women exactly as in men — so silencing a woman's mind is not piety but a kind of theft, and every kitchen, cell, and childhood is already a laboratory of philosophy.
- In their words:
- "I do not study in order to write, still less in order to teach — which in me would be boundless arrogance — but only to see whether by studying I may be less ignorant."
- If you remember one thing:
- When the Church tried to silence the most brilliant mind in the Western Hemisphere because that mind belonged to a woman, she answered with the first great manifesto for women's intellectual rights in the Americas — and then the silence came anyway.