Gendered Property Dispossession and Rights Recovery

As a woman in 17th-century New Spain, Sor Juana experienced direct dispossession: her labor, her writings, her intellectual property, and her economic autonomy were all legally subordinated to male authority and Church control. She was denied the right to own property, manage resources, or exercise economic freedom—deprivations that libertarian justice must recognize as violations of fundamental rights. Sor Juana's life and work demonstrate that libertarian theory cannot ignore how gender-based legal structures systematically prevented entire populations from exercising property rights. Her tradition illuminates how genuine libertarian justice requires examining and dismantling inherited systems of dispossession. Applied today, this concept demands acknowledgment that historical property distributions reflect coercive exclusion, not free exchange, and that real property justice may require addressing structural inequalities that persist from gendered legal disabilities. True libertarian freedom requires that all persons have equal standing to own, control, and benefit from property regardless of gender.