SOURCE: "A Feminist Rereading of Sor Juana's Dream" in Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, edited by Stephanie Merrim, Wayne State University Press, 1991, pp. 142-58.

In the following essay, Sabat de Rivers asserts that El sueño was written from a female perspective and discusses its feminine characteristics.

Undoubtedly there were many more women writing works of literature in colonial Spanish America than those whose names appear in our records from Hispaniola (the presentday Dominican Republic), from Peru, and from New Spain (Mexico). And it is no accident that the names preserved derive precisely from those geographical areas where, in different periods, the major cultural centers were located. It was especially in these centers that women insisted on their right to be heard and read, along with the men who did most of the writing. If our records are fragmentary and sometimes names have...