Institutional Resistance to Women's Economic Participation

The convent seemed to offer Sor Juana economic stability and safety, but it was also a cage limiting her options and claiming her labor. Institutions—religious, legal, educational, professional—often enforce women's economic subordination through seemingly benign rules and structures. Marriage laws that dissolved women's property rights, restrictions on women's education that justified limiting careers, religious doctrines positioning women's subjection as virtue—these were economic systems operating through institutional channels. Economic justice requires recognizing these mechanisms explicitly. When institutions systematically route women into lower-paid sectors, restrict their working hours due to unpaid care expectations, or deny them credit and capital access, this is not individual choice but structural violence. Sor Juana's struggle was partly against institutional walls that made even her exceptional talent barely sufficient to secure subsistence. Economic justice demands institutional transformation: education systems that don't sort by gender, labor laws that accommodate caregiving without penalizing workers, financial systems that don't privilege men as economic agents.