SOURCE: "How I Wrote 'When Women Love Men'," in Papales de Pandora: The Youngest Doll, University of Nebraska Press, 1991, pp. 147-51.

In the brief essay that follows, Ferré details her rationale for the story "When Women Love Men." The author asserts "'When Women Love Men,' in short, is a story which points to specific social problems: the frigidity of women of the higher social class as well as the sexual exploitation of prostitutes are both a consequence of an unjust social hegemony in the hands of men."

Anger has caused innumerable women writers to write well. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican nun, for example, would talk of her poems as fencing foils, with which she would both stab her opponents and defend herself from attack; Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters were all angry writers who personified, in their Gothic monsters...