5 ideas
Culture does not describe women. It builds a feminine image such as the virgin, the mother or the temptress, and hands it to women as the thing they must become. Because the myth is made by others and serves others, a woman who embodies it well exists as an object for someone else rather than as a person who acts. Getting free starts with seeing the image as a fabrication rather than a nature.
Castellanos reads feminine beauty standards, from Chinese foot-binding to corsets and high heels, as techniques that make the body less able to walk, work, flee or act. The prized woman is ornamental and still. Adornment therefore does political work: it turns physical restriction into something women desire and maintain themselves.
Simone Weil was a French philosopher and a trained intellectual. She left teaching to work on the assembly line at Renault so she could know the affliction of factory labor. She joined the anarchist side in the Spanish Civil War. Exiled in England during the Second World War, she limited her eating to the rations of occupied France and died in 1943 at thirty-four. Castellanos uses her as the extreme case of a woman who took her thinking into her own body, to the point of self-annihilation.
The proverb behind the title, "a woman who knows Latin will get neither a husband nor a good end," is a rule a society openly states: learning disqualifies a woman from her assigned destiny. Read through that rule, the lives of women writers show a pattern. Each paid a price or used an escape route, such as Sor Juana's convent, staying single, going into exile or dying early. Their biographies are records of what intellectual freedom cost them, not accidents.
Mexican culture praises the self-denying mother and wife, whose worth is measured by how completely she gives herself up for others. Castellanos argues that this celebrated virtue keeps women from ever becoming authentic selves. It also corrupts the people around them, who are raised on her sacrifice and learn to demand it. Praise works here as a way of controlling women.