120 CHAPTER 5 STATE, CHURCH, AND SOCIETY
but repression was not the whole reality, and
that it did not wholly impair women’s ability of
expression.”
Convent life provided an especially important
means for achieving self-expression and freedom
from male domination and sexual exploitation for
elite and middle-class women. It was common for
one or more daughters of an elite family to enter a
convent. In the seventeenth century, thirteen Lima
convents held more than 20 percent of the city’s
women.^4 The convents were self-governing institu-
(^4) The high cost of marriage dowries, frequently mentioned
by colonial observers, continued to the infl ux of middle-class
tions that gave women the opportunity to display
their capacity for leadership in administration,
management of resources (like other church bod-
ies, convents invested their wealth in mortgages
on urban and rural properties), and sometimes
in politicking, for convents could be the scenes of
stormy factional struggle for control. “The con-
vents,” says Octavio Paz in his biography of the
great poetess Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “experi-
enced the rebellions, quarrels, intrigues, coalitions,
and reprisals of political life.” Nuns frequently
complained to religious authorities about the tyr-
anny of their abbesses, and violent encounters
were not unknown. The convents were also the
scenes of a busy social life; the nuns received their
visitors unveiled, despite the rule forbidding them
to uncover their faces in the presence of outsiders,
and the rule requiring separation by wooden bars
was not strictly observed. “These nuns excelled in
exquisite confectionary arts,” writes Paz, “and in
the no less exquisite arts of martyring themselves
and their sisters.” Paz wonders that Sor Juana, a
lucid intellect familiar with seventeenth-century
European rationalist thought, kept her reason in
that atmosphere of fl agellations and mysticism. In
her autobiographical letter to the bishop of Puebla,
she confessed that convent life imposed obligations
“most repugnant to my temperament” and referred
to the “conventual bustle” that disturbed “the rest-
ful quiet of my books.” Somehow she managed to
keep a distance between her intellect and that at-
mosphere, so foreign to her nature, but occasion-
ally her self-control snapped under strain. Paz tells
the story of a mother superior who complained to
the archbishop of Sor Juana’s haughtiness and ac-
cused her of having rudely said, “Quiet, Mother,
you are a silly woman.” The archbishop, a friend of
Sor Juana, wrote on the margin of the complaint,
“Prove the contrary, and I shall pass judgment.”
and elite women into convents. In a letter to the king,
re quest ing the establishment of a convent, the cabildo of
Buenos Aires noted that “in order to marry off a daughter
with a modicum of decency one needs much more fortune
than for two daughters to become nuns.”
Talented girls like Isabel Flores de Oliva, later
named Saint Rose of Lima, the fi rst female saint
in the Americas, sought artistic and intellectual
independence in the convent. [St. Rose of Lima by
Carlo Dolci; Palazzo Pitti Florence, Italy/Bridgeman Art
Library, London/New York]