Isabel Martínez de Perón
María Estela Martínez Cartas de Perón (born 4 February 1931), better known as Isabel Martínez de Perón () or Isabel Perón, served as the 42nd President of Argentina from 1974 to 1976. She was the third wife of President Juan Perón. During her husband's third term as president from 1973 to 1974, Isabel served as both vice president and First Lady. Following her husband's death in office in 1974, Isabel served as president of Argentina from 1 July 1974 to 24 March 1976, when the military took over the government and placed her under house arrest for five years, before exiling her to Spain in 1981. She holds the distinction of having been the first woman to have had the title of "President", as opposed to a queen or prime minister.
Juana Inés de la Cruz
Arguably the most important book devoted to Sor Juana, written by Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz in Spanish and translated to English in 1989 as "" (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden). This work examines and contemplates Sor Juana's poetry and life in the context of the history of New Spain, particularly focusing on the difficulties women then faced while trying to thrive in academic and artistic fields. Paz describes how he had been drawn to her work by the enigmas of Sor Juana's personality and life paths. "Why did she become a nun? How could she renounce her lifelong passion for writing and learning?"However, it wasn't only the enigmas that attracted Paz to research on the nun's life and works. Octavio Paz's book on Sor Juana is perhaps his most personal search. It is unavoidable to see the coincidences between these two writers, separated by more than 3 centuries, and who are the product of a Mexico that has yet to resolve its own historical identity. Sor Juana, who possessed an admirable genius, was trapped within a context that did not understand, nor accept her completely. On the other hand, we have an Octavio Paz who also felt a fractured connection with his own country. A country he constantly tried to comprehend through his writings.
In his book, Paz makes a thorough analysis of Sor Juana's poetry and traces some of her influences to the Spanish writers of the Golden Age and the Hermetic tradition, mainly derived from the works of a noted Jesuit scholar of her era, Athanasius Kircher. Paz analyses Sor Juana's most ambitious and extensive poem, "First Dream" ("Primero Sueño") as largely a representation of the desire of knowledge through a number of hermetic symbols, albeit transformed in her own language and skilled image-making abilities. In conclusion, Paz makes the case that Sor Juana's works were the most important body of poetic work produced in the Americas until the arrival of 19th-century figures such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.