The Answer, Section 1

I think that part of what Sor Juana expects readers to understand is how hard women had to fight to educate themselves. Like Pizan, she tells her own story of trying to learn in a society that opposed this. Despite the fact that she usually lacked teachers to instruct her, Sor Juana still managed to learn about many topics like science, rhetoric, math, and more, on her own. She frequently describes her will to learn as a burning desire, something she can’t escape. In doing that, she challenges the thought that women are naturally disinclined to develop their intellects, and pins it instead on society’s repressing them. Sor Juana calls her desire to learn a sin, and thus, sarcastically insinuates that men, especially those in the Church, have imposed this thought on society. Rhetorically, Sor Juana uses a few devices frequently. I noticed that she used ethos to create a persona for herself that was very intelligent, yet humble. She suits this persona to her audience (Sor Filotea) to mock him with her seeming humility and also show that unlike educated men, educated women don't have to act arrogantly. This is also understatement because she calls herself weak and unworthy, when she obviously isn’t. She qualifies her statements to feign uncertainty about her own argument. To get her point across, she also uses rhetorical questions to lead into logical responses that refute Sor Filotea’s argument.   

One thing I found striking in Sor Juana’s answer was when she wrote “Without Logic, how should I know the general and specific methods by which Holy Scripture is written? Without Rhetoric, how should I understand its figures, tropes, and locutions? (53). As a woman, Sor Juana wasn’t supposed to be any kind of scholar. It seems that even nuns, who were expected to uphold God’s word in the Bible, were not encouraged to study the Bible in depth or understand it in the same way that their male counterparts did. Sor Juana could be pointing out that it is ironic that many nuns were simply taught to accept stories in the Bible with little interpretation when they were supposed to know it more profoundly than the average person. She mentions that in addition to knowledge of logic and rhetoric, science, history, law, and math help to know what is happening in the Bible. By bringing up all the different subjects that are integrated into the Bible, Sor Juana also displayed her knowledge of a great variety of topics to Sor Filotea.

Another bit of Sor Juana’s answer I found interesting was “The advantages of intelligence are advantages of being… And thus, as no one wants to be less than another, no one will admit that another possesses superior powers of mind…” (67). This means that intelligence makes those who have it threatening because it empowers them as human beings. Like Pizan and Zayas claimed, men think of the world as a hierarchy; one that they have to be at the top of. Sor Juana is pointing out that any intelligence in women is stifled so they cannot be equal to men. She has personally experienced this, which is part of the reason she has to defend herself in this answer back to Sor Filotea, a man.