Juana Inés de la Cruz, scholar, nun, poet, and one the earliest champions of equality for women in the church, d. in Mexico, 4/17/1694. When her bishop praised her learning but urged her to restrict herself to activities more becoming a member of her sex she responded at length.
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Defending her compulsion to learn as a God-given calling, one she was powerless to deny, she said that even if deprived of books all the world was her university: "There is no creature, however lowly, in which one cannot recognize that *God made me.*"