Born of noble blood in Madrid, the political and cultural capital of one of the most powerful nations in the world, Sotomayor had the best opportunities available, which she exploited to the fullest, for education and acceptance in her day.

      Using the framework established by Baccoccio in Decameron, Zayas wrote 2 books of short stories (1637, 1647) with the stories bound together by a narrator. In the first volume, the noblewoman Lysis's friends decide to hold a series of soirees, where they will tell true or true-to-life stories, at her home to entertain her while she is recovering from quatran fever. In the second volume, while still recovering, Lysis herself organizes the soirees. In both books, all of the story tellers are women, telling their stories about women from a woman's perspective. No flowery, addled visionary of women's reality, Zayas denounces the abuses, violations, and injustices perpetrated against women in a society saturated by a machismo double-standard. She insistently warns women of men's treachery and encourages women to stand on their own two feet.

      Here is how a man punished his wife who had falsely been accused of being unfaithful to him. From "Too Late for Disillusionment"

      In conclusion, I have held her penned up, in the condition that you have seen, for two years. She eats and drinks no more than that ration which was allotted to her today. A heap of straw is her only bed and the nook in which she stays is not any larger than the space occupied by her reclining body. Her sole companion is the skull of her treacherous, beloved cousin. She is to remain in this condition until the moment of her death, witnessing day in and day out how the slave, who she most despised, is now adorned with the finery that once belonged to her and is exalted in the position that she herself occupied at my table and at my side.

References:

      Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke (eds.), Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century [Athens: U. of Georgia Press, 1989] pp 189 - 227

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