Roles and Choices of Women
             Throughout history, women have been forced into a subservient role, forced to abandon their own self-interest for the interest of men. Confined to the private sector of social life, women have had two choices, to follow the path of marriage or the path of serving their god. They have been forbidden to seek knowledge beyond that of the household and of religion. In I, the Worst of All, the protagonist, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, chose to serve God and defy social norms by continuing her search for knowledge. This renowned literary figure, whose thinking and ideals mirrored that of the Enlightenment, encouraged young girls and women, to develop their minds, for, as she said in the movie, "Intelligence has no sex. Keep your eyes open and your ears also, so you can perceive everything." This thinking persuaded females to move outside the private sector and into the public sector destroying the boundary that segregated women from men. I, the Worst of All, Sor Juana's life, and the lives of Latin American women, reveal society's attitudes toward women, the social roles they were expected to conform to, and the choices for elite women, while at the same time, illustrating the circumstances and changes that revolutionized female life in Latin America.
             The social status of women in Latin America has been continually subjected to the ideology of paternalism. From pre-Columbian to colonial Spanish America "a man's role was to guide and control, a women's to obey, whether within the context of kinship, marriage, or the church (Socolow 7). This can be seen in the choices of the elite women in Sor Juana's time. In pre-Columbian times, "a wife's duties centered around her productive tasks within the household (including cleaning and fulfilling household religious rituals)" (Socolow 22). For the most part, this was similar to, until recently, the social stat...