November 12th Birthdays

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

(1815 – October 26, 1902) was an American social activist abolitionist, and leading figure of the early woman's movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the first women's rights convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized woman's rights and woman's suffrage movements in the United States.

Before Stanton narrowed her political focus almost exclusively to women's rights, she was an active abolitionist together with her husband, Henry Brewster Stanton and cousin, Gerrit Smith. Unlike many of those involved in the women's rights movement, Stanton addressed a number of issues pertaining to women beyond voting rights. Her concerns included women's parental and custody rights, property rights, employment and income rights, divorce laws, the economic health of the family, and birth control. She was also an outspoken supporter of the 19th-century temperance movement.

After the American Civil War, Stanton's commitment to female suffrage caused a schism in the women's rights movement when she, along with Susan B. Anthony, declined to support passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. She opposed giving added legal protection and voting rights to African American men while continuing to deny women, black and white, the same rights. Her position on this issue, together with her thoughts on organized Christianity and women's issues beyond voting rights, led to the formation of two separate women's rights organizations that were finally rejoined, with Stanton as president of the joint organization, approximately 20 years later.

Quotes:

"The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way."

"I obstinately refused to obey one with whom I supposed I was entering into an equal relation." (Requesting that the phrase “promise to obey” be removed from the wedding vows).

“The custom of calling women Mrs. John This and Mrs. Tom That and colored men Sambo and Zip Coon, is founded on the principle that white men are lords of all."

Speaking on behalf of black women, she stated that “not allowing them to vote condemned African American freedwomen ‘to a triple bondage that man never knows’, that of slavery, gender, and race”.

Further reading:

The Womans Bible
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trr096.html






Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651 or in 1648 – April 17, 1695), also known by her full name Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz de Asbaje (or Asuaje) y Ramírez de Santillana, born as Juana Inés Ramírez de Santillana.

Sor Juana was a self-taught Novohispana scholar (mathematician [1]), poet, a writer of the Baroque school and nun. Though she lived in a colonial era when Mexico was part of the Spanish empire, she is considered a Mexican writer, and a precursor to later Mexican literature.

Sor Juana was born in San Miguel Nepantla. Sor Juana began life as the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish nobleman, at a time when bloodlines strictly dictated class and status. Her mother was born in Yecapixtla. Her grandfather owned property in San Miguel Nepantla, and Sor Juana spent her early years living with her mother on his hacienda. Sor Juana was a gifted child who hid in the hacienda chapel to read her grandfather's books from the adjoining library, something forbidden to girls. She learned how to read and write at the age of 3. By adolescence, she had mastered Greek logic, and at age thirteen she was teaching Latin to young children.

In 1664, at age sixteen, Juana was sent to live in Mexico City, and came under the tutelage of the Vicerreine Leonor Carreto, wife of Viceroy Antonio Sebastián de Toledo.

There is ongoing debate by some modern authors, questioning whether she had a personal romantic life while in the convent. Some have even suggested that she was lesbian or bisexual, as affectionate love is often nuanced in her poems both about men and women, and her language is often a sensory and sometimes seeming ecstatic and even erotic. However, others point to poetic traditions in pre-conquest Mexico wherein poetry was high art, and relationship with the gods was often spoken about in terms of erotic lyricism. Thus the debate continues about whether her writings are solely allegorical or have some literal reflection of personal affairs.

In her time, the convent was the only refuge in which a female could properly attend to education of her mind, spirit, body and soul. In Sor Juana's era, educating girls was not only non-existent, but often considered by Spanish prelates to be the dark work of the Devil.

Nonetheless, Sor Juana wrote literature centered on freedom. In her poem "Redondillas" she defends a woman's right to be respected as a human being. In "Hombres necios" (Stubborn men), she criticizes the sexism of the society of her time, poking fun at and revealing the hypocrisy of men who publicly condemn prostitutes, yet privately pay women to perform on them what they have just said is an abomination to God.

Sor Juana asks the sharp question in this age-old matter of the purity/whoredom split found in base male mentality: "Who sins more, she who sins for pay? Or he who pays for sin?"

Developing her themes further, she wrote a romantic comedy entitled 'Los empeños de una casa' about a brother and a sister entangled in webs of love, elucidating the themes of love and jealousy. She did not moralize, but rather, in the spirit of her lifetime interests, inquired how these deeply emotional matters shaped and carved a woman's pursuit of liberty, knowledge, education and freedom to live her life in self-sovereignty.

Her 'thinking out loud' was especially dangerous because the Counter Reformation was raging. Anyone who challenged societal values and ecclesiastical dogma could be marked by the Church as a heretic, and thereby harmed by the Church bearing false witness against the person; by the Church silencing them; forcing them into penitence, or else stripping them of property and assets, including those of one's family; they could be tortured, exiled, imprisoned or murdered.

Her 'thinking out loud' was especially dangerous because the Counter Reformation was raging. Anyone who challenged societal values and ecclesiastical dogma could be marked by the Church as a heretic, and thereby harmed by the Church bearing false witness against the person; by the Church silencing them; forcing them into penitence, or else stripping them of property and assets, including those of one's family; they could be tortured, exiled, imprisoned or murdered.

Matters came to a head in 1690, when a letter was published attacking Sor Juana's focus on the sciences, and suggesting that she should devote her time to soft theology. However, powerful representatives from the Spanish court were her mentors and she was widely read in Spain, being called "the Tenth Muse". She was lauded as the most prominent poet of the post-conquest American Continent. Her work was printed by the first printing press of the American Continent in Mexico City.

Further reading:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sorjuana/