Module 8 - Part 1: Overview

Other parts of this module include:
Index  |  Part 2: Explorations and Exercises  |  Part 3: Texts and Contexts  |  Part 4: Web Resources

Women and Learning in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Focus on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

"One hardly expects to find a spirited defense of women's intellectual rights issuing from the pen of a seventeenth-century Mexican nun, but Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz by Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz is exactly that. In the guise of declaring her humility and her religious subordination, this nun manages to advance claims for her sex more far-reaching and profound than any previously offered." (p. 403)

"In France . . . social life took place often in "salons," gatherings to engage in intellectual, as well as frivolous conversation. Women typically presided over these salons, thus declaring both their intellectual authority and their capacity to combine high thought with high style." (p. 297)

"[ The Story of the Stone ] often juxtaposes brutish characters . . . with those possessed of a finer sensibility; but in the case of Dai-yu, sensibility is carried to the extreme." (p. 147)

Queen Christina of Sweden on horseback, painted by Sebastien Bourdon in 1653. This portrait is in the collection of the Prado in Spain . Note the commanding presence of the equestrian queen, who often wore men's clothes and pursued scholarship and the arts. Her studies in religion and philosophy led this Lutheran ruler to convert to Catholicism and abdicate her throne. She was received by the Pope and settled in Rome in the late 1660s. For a time, her confessor there was Antonio de Vieira, the Portuguese Jesuit whose Maundy Thursday sermon of 1650 was the subject of Sor Juana's Athenagoric Letter.
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Talented women have always existed; opportunities for them to express their talents have not. Nevertheless, brilliant women have always been able to make their mark. Ancient literature offers many portraits of commanding and distinctive women: Greek dramas focus on fictional characters like Medea and Lysistrata, for example, and the Bible introduces compelling personalities like Deborah and Ruth. History records the accomplishment of noteworthy female rulers such as Queen Elizabeth I of England and Queen Christina of Sweden . By the early modern period, however, and increasingly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more and more exceptional women in less exalted walks of life found ways to exercise their powers and leave records of their brilliance. Careers for women slowly began to open up with the growth of cities and their demand for intellectual skills; in seventeenth-century London , for example, a woman like Aphra Behn could actually support herself as a writer. While this degree of independence remained rare, in other, more traditional arenas like the court and the church, women could make their mark. This module traces the progress of some remarkable women writers and considers how their gifts were received by the male-dominated worlds in which they functioned. From a convent in Mexico City to the courts of Europe to the privileged households of East Asia , these women were self-conscious advocates for the powers of their sex.

One of several similar portraits of Sor Juana.
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Sor Juana: "With No Teachers but My Books" (p. 410)

In a village about thirty miles from Mexico City , in the year 1648, a daughter was born to one Isabel Ramirez. This child, Juana Ines, was the youngest of Isabel Ramirez's three daughters by a man named Pedro Asbaje. Historians debate the legitimacy of these three young women (and their three half brothers, sired by another father), but whether Isabel was married or not, she brought her children up on her own. The youngest Ramirez daughter is known to us today as Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. In her Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz , she explains how, thanks to her strong-minded mother's decisions, she acquired her education and, one suspects, her independent spirit.

As a three-year-old, Juana accompanied her older sister to a local school for girls, where she displayed her intellectual precocity by learning to read at a time in her life when no one would have believed it possible. Denied the opportunity she begged for-to dress as a boy (as had Queen Christina and the notorious Catalina de Erauso) and attend the University of Mexico City -the little girl educated herself by reading the books in her grandfather's library. This auto-didact was on the road toward making a brilliant literary and scholarly reputation for herself. Years later, when her Athenagoric Letter was published without her permission, Sor Juana felt constrained to defend herself in her Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz . Although the argument of the Reply compels us even today, the effort to maintain the life of the mind defeated Sor Juana. After writing her apologia, she gave up her books and died of the plague she contracted by nursing others.

A portrait of Catalina de Erauso, a woman who escaped from a Spanish convent and lived as a man in South America, ending her life in Mexico . Francisco Pacheco, who painted this portrait in 1630, was the father-in-law of the great Spanish painter Diego Velasquez.
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A copy of a portrait of Sor Juana in the convent of St. Paula and St. Jerome in Seville . Note the scene on the medallion.
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Learning and nunneries

All of the extant portraits of Sor Juana show her wearing a large medallion in the style favored by several orders of Latin American nuns. Depicted on the medallion in the image referred to above is a telling image of the Annunciation: the Virgin Mary reads as the Angel Gabriel gestures to her. This emphasis on the book, which stands for the Word that Mary will deliver to the world, is a fitting emblem for the intellectual freedom that the convent offered so many women of intellect. In defending herself to the bishop, Sor Juana cites the example of visionaries like Saint Teresa of Avila, whose mystical writings inspired an outpouring of religious devotion: "how are we to view the fact that the church permitted a Gertrudis, a Santa Teresa, a Saint Birgitta, the Nun of Agreda, and so many others, to write?" she asks (p. 425). But scholars point out that Saint Teresa was careful to preface her writings with frequent references to her incapacity as a female. Sor Juana's style of expression in her work prior to the Reply to Sor Filotea had not been so circumspect. Indeed, she wrote copiously in secular forms, producing plays in the style of Calderon and lyrics in the style of Luis de Gongora, the preeminent authors of Baroque Spain.

Detail from a painting by Francisco de Zurbaran, Saint Jerome with Saint Paula and Saint Eustochium (1640-50), in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Saint Paula was a Roman widow of great intellectual prowess. With her eldest daughter, Eustochium, she assisted Saint Jerome and maintained a monastery.
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Sor Juana's life in the Convent of Santa Paula

When Juana Ines reached the age of sixteen, Isabel Ramirez sent her to live with her sister in the capital city, where new opportunities opened up for the talented young woman. Juana became a favorite of the Marquis of Mancera, the Spanish viceroy, and his wife, Leonor Carrero, whom she served as a lady-in-waiting for several years. In her Reply , Sor Juana says that her "total antipathy" (p. 409) for marriage led her to enter the religious life. After three difficult months in 1667, she left the famously confining Convent of the Discalced Carmelites. A year later, she tried again, this time choosing the Order of St. Jerome. She spent the rest of her life in the relatively worldly atmosphere of the Convent of Santa Paula. The woman who complained of lacking a teacher is said to have accumulated a library with four thousand books and to have taken charge of the dramatic and musical education of the girls who studied at the convent, writing plays and music for them to perform. She continued to participate in the courtly culture of seventeenth-century Mexico City by reigning over a salon frequented by the intellectual and political elite of her era; at the same time, as the Response to Sor Filotea tells us, she adjudicated disputes and gave counsel to her sister nuns.

Detail from a painting by Giovanni del Biondo, St. Jerome with the Lion and Three Adoring Nuns , ca. 1365. Staaliches Lindenau Museum , Altenburg .
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Nuns as Objects of Satire

The challenge that Sor Juana responds to in Reply to Sor Filotea is that she does not confine herself to religious subjects. Unlike the nuns in Giovanni del Biondo's picture, who pray devoutly at the side of St. Jerome , she dared to study secular matters. The Bishop of Puebla, speaking in the voice of Sor Filotea de la Cruz, invoked the patron saint of her order in chastising her: "Saint Jerome was scourged by angels for reading Cicero and, like a wretch, not a free man, preferring the seductiveness of his eloquence to the solidity of Holy Scripture" ( Admonishment: The Letter of Sor Philothea de la Cruz , trans. Alan S. Trueblood, A Sor Juana Anthology . Cambridge , Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 202). St. Jerome ultimately gave up secular studies. Sor Filotea counsels Sor Juana to do the same, lest she put herself in the company of the errant nuns so beloved of satirists.

A woodcut based on the Ellesmere manuscript's portrait of the Prioress.
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Late medieval and early modern literature abounds in portraits of corrupt convents and misplaced nuns: as readers of the Norton Anthology of World Literature know, Chaucer trains a slyly humorous eye on the ladylike Prioress who watches her table manners on the road to Canterbury when she probably should have been praying in her priory cell. A sad dream vision in fifteenth-century English speaks in the voice of an upright girl named Katherine who wishes to take religious vows but learns from a catalog of the sinful denizens of the average convent why she "can't be a nun." Buddhist nuns have similar reputations. The narrator of Ihara Saikaku's The Barrelmaker Brimful of Love makes it clear that fallen women populate the convents of seventeenth-century Japan (p. 601). Hypocritical nuns figure in Sanskrit texts as well, as in "The Red Lotus of Chastity" from Kathasaritsagara (Vol. B, pp. 1346ff). These women, however, concentrate on licentious meddling and show little interest in erudition. Sor Juana's lust for learning rather than for the flesh marks her as a dangerous female intellectual of the sort that held some sway in the great cities of Europe .

Fashion plates from The History of Costume by Braun and Schneider: what the French elite wore in the middle third of the seventeenth century.
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Learned Ladies in France and England

The French salons

A constellation of dynastic and political circumstances gave unusual prominence to a number of cultivated women in seventeenth-century France . In the wake of his father's assassination in 1610, the nine-year-old Louis XIII came to the throne; in 1643, Louis XIV succeeded him at the age of five. In the early years of their reigns, their mothers-Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria-exercised considerable power as opposing parties vied to fill the dangerous vacuum typically created in a court led by a minor. During this tumultuous time, France was torn by religious wars and conflict between the king and the aristocracy. One young noblewoman who had been brought up in Italy, Catherine de Vivonne, the Marquise de Rambouillet (1588-1665), distanced herself from the factionalism and vulgarity of the royal court by establishing her residence in what was to become known as the Hotel de Rambouillet. Catherine organized the rooms of her mansion to encourage small conversational groupings. Her chambre bleue (a novel color choice given the conventions of interior decoration of the day) became the prototypical salon that was to bring such distinction to French literary life for more than a century. The salon was a domestic space in which women in particular could elevate polite discourse and discuss the intellectual developments of their age.

Claude Lefebvre, Madame de Sévigne (1662).
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Preciosite

A literary style known as preciosite emerged from the lively conversations and playful games in which the visitors to the salons of Paris engaged. One of the central figures of the movement, Madeleine de Scudery, wrote multi-volume romance novels that were suffused with feminine elegance and Platonic love but widely regarded as aesthetically inferior. In a one-act play called Les Precieuses Ridicules (1659), Molière poked fun at the pretensions of two young provincials who reject the suitors proposed by their father because they deem them crude, only to fall in love with the suitors' valets, disguised as wits. Eleven years later, Molière returned to the subject in a more substantial play, Les Femmes Savants ("The Learned Ladies"). Produced in 1672, this comedy mocks literary disputes clearly modeled on a notorious confrontation of poets that had occurred in one of the fashionable salons of the period; it also gave Molière a chance to defend his own literary skills against criticism. The genuine contributions made by the salons, however, stood up to satire: Madame de Sable, for instance, matched pithy reflections on human nature with the better-known Duc de la Rochefoucauld, and the Marquise de Sévigne demonstrated a penetrating wit in the letters she wrote to her daughter, separated from her by marriage, describing life in the metropolis. Women like these, who knew the scope of their own abilities and accomplishments, found Molière's work amusing. At their best, these social gatherings increased the sum of human knowledge and provided an informal atmosphere in which higher learning could be pursued.

The title page of a Jacobean pamphlet called Haec Vir , written in defense of women's rights to dress like men and assert themselves, from a faculty site at Illinois State University .
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The beginnings of English feminism

In contrast to their French counterparts, educated Englishwomen of the seventeenth-century took up the struggle for women's rights. Yet in the decades after the death of Elizabeth I, an enlightened female monarch who was succeeded by a repressive male ruler (James I), women seemed to lose rather than gain ground. Fierce polemics attacked those who dared to live like men (the most famous condemned "Hic Mulier," the prototype of a mannish woman, and "Haec Vir," a feminized male). The war between social conservatives and reformers encapsulated by these controversies erupted into a full-scale civil war in which James's son, Charles I, was beheaded. Between 1649 and 1660, the years of Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Commonwealth , an egalitarian ideology allowed discussion of revolutionary ideas such as divorce.

A portrait of Anna Maria van Schurman by Jan Lievens, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Great Britain .
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Intellectual projects for women

During the Restoration, a reactionary period dominated by the licentious court of Charles II, serious moralists like Bathsua Pell Makin (1608?-1675?) and Mary Astell (1666-1731) systematically laid out the case for educating women. In An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), Makin acknowledged the influence of the remarkable Dutch feminist, Anna Maria van Schurman(1607-1679) and cited other precedents of learned ladies from antiquity on. Astell goes further in suggesting that women should be sequestered from the lewd male world that trivializes them. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) deplores the example set by the "the vain and the gay" and advocates the institution of a "Religious Retirement" where young women might study and adorn "their minds with useful Knowledge." She recommends to them the example of the French salonnières :

And why shall it not be thought as genteel to understand French philosophy as to be accoutred in a French mode? Let therefore the famous Madam D'Acier, Scudery, etc. . . . excite the Emulation of the English Ladies. (Moira Ferguson, Ed., First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578-1799 [Indiana University Press, 1985], pp. 181-90)

Astell's Serious Proposal was written in the year in which Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, who had sought and for some years achieved just such an intellectual refuge, died. English readers found Astell's suggestion too Catholic for their tastes, but Astell went on to write Some Reflections Upon Marriage , in which she argues, much as Sor Juana does, for the scriptural support of women's learning. Like Sor Juana, she cites St. Paul , whose prohibition against women teaching in church assumes no "suppos'd Want of Understanding in Woman, or of ability to teach; neither does he confine them at all Times to learn in Silence." (Ferguson, pp. 193-94)

Portrait of Aphra Behn by Mary Beale.
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Women Writers in the Marketplace

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) spent some of her early years in Surinam . When she returned to Europe , she was briefly married to a businessman of German origins. Her experiences in the South American colony gave her the background to write Oronooko: or The Royal Slave , the earliest piece of English fiction to attack slavery; her cosmopolitan marriage gave her the connections she exploited for a short while as a spy employed by Charles II. In need of money after her husband's death, she became a successful playwright and used the stage as a vehicle for advertising women's gifts. Knowing what it meant to be pursued by the town fops, she laughed at fools. Disenchanted with her world, she broke with the stale conventions that deprived women of freedom and late-seventeenth-century spontaneity.

Your way of Writing's out of fashion grown,
Method, and Rule-you only understand;
Pursue that way of Fooling, and be damn'd. . . .
And if you're drawn to th' Life, pray tell me then,
Why Women should not write as well as Men.
(Concluding lines of the Epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy ,
in Ferguson , p. 146)

Mary Wollstonecraft, as painted by John Opie.
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In English drawing rooms, the counterparts of the salonnières, well-read women, known as "bluestockings," actively engaged in intellectual discourse. In the marketplace, more and more women were following in Behn's footsteps, earning their own keep as professional writers. First among them is Mary Wollestonecraft (1759-1797), who began her career in the occupations relegated to women-sewing, serving as a governess, running a school for girls. To improve on the limited store of educational resources available to her, she compiled anthologies to teach language and morals to the young. After studying French and German, she left the provinces and moved to London where she made a living for herself as a writer, initially as a translator and ultimately as the author of some eleven diverse works, including Thoughts on the Education of Daughters , two novels, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark , and two political vindications of human rights in an age of revolutions.

The title page of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman .
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At the height of the French Revolution that had seemed to promise the realization of progressive ideas, Wollstonecraft angrily responded to French minister Talleyrand's program of free public education for males only. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791), she examined in exhaustive detail the ways in which denying serious education to women hurt both sexes and undermined society. A student of both traditional and feminist literature and a world traveler who had worked in many professional capacities, Wollstonecraft continues to inspire women to seek careers as intellectuals and scholars.

Palace ladies depicted by Chiao Ping-Chen (fl. 1662-1726), a court painter who had come under the influence of European pictorial modes. In the collection of the National Palace Museum of Taiwan.
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