Gender inequality is not a set of individual men making unfair choices but a structure — built from centuries of law, theology, economic arrangement, and cultural norm — that systematically advantages people positioned as male and disadvantages those positioned as female, with particular severity for those at additional intersections of marginalization. Juana encountered the structure in its starkest form: the entire apparatus of colonial religious patriarchy deployed against one woman who wanted to read. What she named individually, structural analysis names collectively: the personal story is a data point in a pattern.
Juana