Illustrious Puerto Rican writer, activist and spiritist, Simplicia Armstrong Márquez de Ramú was born in the city of Ponce in 1863. The daughter of Tomás Armstrong, a Protestant Englishman who died when she was only five years old, and Ramona Márquez, a Catholic mother who left her orphaned at thirteen and in charge of a nine-year-old brother, Armstrong de Ramú dedicated her life to the struggle for the emancipation of Puerto Rican women. With an original and complex way of thinking, she analysed a society structurally served by patriarchy, misogyny and religious fanaticism, concluding that only women, entrusted by tradition to form the conscience of the new generations, could make the necessary changes to open up the public space; that only she herself, in solidarity with other emancipated women and men, could liberate herself. Spiritism led her to take ownership of her own conscience and to use the free thinking demanded by reason to achieve a moral and intellectual emancipation that did not feed on rules, traditions, or customs. She rethought both gender roles and domesticity and adopted a spiritist spirituality that enabled her to approach the experience of the oppressed with a deep sense of charity and justice....