Podcast Proposal Script
We often learn that history is written by the victors, and most of the time, those victors are men. In a time where women’s rights are under attack by the men who hold power, we can look back at history and take inspiration from the strong women of the past who found the courage to stick it to the man, and stayed true to themselves. This is the goal of my proposed podcast, ______. In each self-contained episode, I will tell my guest the life story of an overlooked woman in history, pausing along the way to analyze how the culture in that particular time and place compare to the culture now. The goal of this podcast is to hopefully inspire other women to follow in their footsteps.
**Note: because of the conversational nature of this podcast, not all of it can be scripted. Below is the story I will tell my guest, with pauses indicating where I anticipate some unscripted conversation will happen.
Episode 1
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, The Worst of All
Welcome to ____, the podcast where we talk about strong female figures throughout history. Today, I’m with my guest, ___. Welcome to the show!
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So today I’m going to tell you the life story of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Latin American child prodigy, poet, scholar, and nun who stood strong in the face of sexism. Have you heard of her before?
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On November 12, 1651, Juana Inés de la Cruz was born in present-day Mexico out of wedlock to a Creole mother and a Spanish father. Her father was never present in her life, and did not support her family, so Juana grew up living with her mother and many sisters on her grandfather’s estate.
In a time when women rarely had access to education, Juana thirsted for knowledge from a young age. When she was three years old, she followed her sister to school, where she begged for someone to teach her to read and write. She used to hide in her grandfather’s library, where she read every book she could get her hands on. When she was eight years old, she had written her first poem, which was about the Lord’s Supper. Because, as a female, she had no access to formal education, she had taught herself Greek logic, Latin, and the Aztec language Nahuatl, in which she had written a few poems. If she thought she didn’t learn something fast enough, she would punish herself by cutting her hair short.
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In 1664, when Juana was 12, she asked her mother if she could disguise herself as a man and go to a university in Mexico City, and of course, her mom said no. She was just looking out for her. Instead, she continued to teach herself privately all the subjects not taught to girls, and she taught Latin to young children around the community. Word got around of Juana’s intelligence. When she was 17, she was presented to the court of the Viceroy Marquis de Mancera, who had gathered a panel of 40 scholars—philosophers, mathematicians, historians—to test her intelligence. They asked her a variety of questions about science and literature, all of which she was unprepared for, in order to see if she was a charlatan. And guess how she did.
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She did amazing. According to the Viceroy, “in the manner that a royal galleon might fend off the attacks of a few canoes, so did Juana extricate herself from the questions, arguments, and objections of these many men, each in his specialty, directed to her” She became a lady-in-waiting on the Viceroy’s court, serving his wife. But remember, she was born out of wedlock. She was a female illegitimate child, so though she was respected for her knowledge, people kept on gossiping about her. Juana hated that. So, she retreated back to books.
Okay now guess what happens next.
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So at this point in the story, Juana was in her late teens, meaning she was of marriageable age, and she HAD to have a husband. However, she had seen her sisters’ gross husbands, and she had been flirted with numerous times as a lady in waiting, so she was not interested in the idea of men. Now as a side-note, I’ll say many scholars believe that based on her writing, she might have been lesbian, making her one of the most prominent LGBT figures in Mexican history. However, there is no solid evidence and it’s hotly-debated, so I’m not going to go into it, even though I believe it might have been true.
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Back to the story. Instead of getting married, she decided to become a nun at the Convent of St. Jerome in Mexico City, saying she wanted “to have no fixed occupation which might curtail my freedom to study.” She enjoyed the convent because it gave her plenty of time to study everything under the sun, and write plays, music, and poetry under the patronage of the viceroy, who had her works published in Spain. She faced a lot of heat and criticism for being unfeminine, but she had her patrons in high places to support her. She became famous around the world, but she was happy writing in her convent.
In this time, Juana produced her magnum opus, a 975-line poem entitled Primero Sueño, meaning First Dream, in which she describes her soul’s thirst for knowledge. In the poem, her soul rises above the world and takes in all of creation, but because of some natural flaw, it was unable to take it all in, so she fell. Now it’s really long, so I can’t show you the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt—the first stanza:
Any thoughts?
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Now here’s where the story gets bad. When Juana was 39, she wrote a critique of another priest’s sermon, intending it to be a mild political attack to keep her voice heard. In response, she got a letter from the writer of that sermon, criticizing her for her comments, basically saying that she had no place criticizing him because she was a woman. She wrote back a letter entitled Respuesta, meaning “The Reply,” which has now been called the first feminist manifesto, because in it, she defended a woman’s right to education, saying “Who has forbidden women to engage in private and individual studies? Have they not a rational soul as men do?...I have this inclination to study and if it is evil I am not the one who formed me thus—I was born with it and I shall die.”
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Predictably, the fallout after this one was even worse, which she anticipated while writing it. Even her patrons, the people who supported her throughout her career, turned their backs on her. Priests investigated everything she had ever written for being “too secular.” She was forced to give away all her scholarly possessions—books, instruments, etc., so she donated them to the poor. She also signed a document formally renouncing all writing. Signed in her blood, the last words she wrote were, “Signed Inés de la Cruz, The Worst of All.”
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In 1695, the convent suffered from a plague. Juana died taking care of her fellow nuns at the age of 44. The works Juana Inés de la Cruz were rediscovered in the late 20th century with the rise of the feminist movement. Today, she has earned her place on the Mexican 200 Peso note, and is credited as the first published feminist of the New World.
So what do you think?
