Rights as Practices, Not Abstractions

Sor Juana lived in a context where women's intellectual capacity was theoretically acknowledged (the existence of female saints proved it) yet practically forbidden. This reveals that fairness is not achieved through abstract rights declarations—it requires embedding rights into actual practices, institutions, and customs. A right to education means nothing without schools, teachers, and social acceptance of educated women. A right to thought means nothing without protection from punishment for thinking. Civilizations cannot claim fairness by proclaiming nice principles while structuring daily life to violate them. Justice is achieved through the hard work of building practices that enable rights to function. This explains why formal equality—equal laws applied equally—often fails to produce fairness: the underlying practices and institutions may still exclude certain people. Sor Juana's struggle was not primarily against unjust laws but against practices and expectations that treated her intellectual work as transgressive despite lack of explicit prohibition.