Reclaiming Intellectual Lineage

Sor Juana engaged with women philosophers and theologians across history, consciously positioning herself within a tradition of women's intellectual work. Reclaiming intellectual lineage is both a historical and strategic practice: it reveals that women have always thought, theorized, and produced knowledge despite systemic erasure. Structural gender inequality includes epistemic injustice—the historical suppression, forgetting, or misattribution of women's ideas. When women cannot name their intellectual predecessors, they cannot claim lineage or inheritance; each generation of women intellectuals seems to start from zero. Recovering women's intellectual history exposes that what appears to be individual male genius often built on or appropriated women's work. Reclaiming lineage allows contemporary women to see themselves as part of tradition, grounding authority not in individual exceptionality but in collective heritage. This practice has political force: it demonstrates women's capacity for complex thought across centuries and cultures, challenges narratives of progress, and provides frameworks for contemporary analysis. Structurally, this requires institutional commitment to teaching women's ideas, supporting research on women thinkers, and treating women's intellectual history as central rather than supplementary to knowledge domains.