Quote by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: “Who is to blame? She who sins for pay or he who pays for sin?”

In colonial society, women who transgressed moral codes were blamed entirely — while the men who created those conditions faced no equivalent judgment. Sor Juana turns the accusation back: if a woman sins, who created the conditions that made it profitable? The double standard is the real crime.

Sor Juana wrote Hombres necios in colonial Mexico under the authority of the Spanish Church, in a society that severely restricted women's education and public expression. She had entered a convent partly to gain access to books and intellectual life, and her work consistently challenged the hypocrisy of the patriarchal colonial order.

Mexican poet, philosopher, and nun of the colonial era, considered the first published feminist writer of the Americas. Her poetry, plays, and essays challenged the intellectual and social restrictions placed on women in seventeenth-century New Spain with extraordinary courage.