Rosario Ferre, a Puerto Rican writer whose mother came from the landowning elite and whose father, an industrialist, was a pro-statehood governor of the Commonwealth, is herself a supporter of independence for the island. Set in Puerto Rico in the era in which the old sugar cane aristocracy was giving way to the new industrial wealth, each class patriarchal in its own way, "The Youngest Doll" contains a shocking doctor-patient scene showing how social classes use their power and, in particular, how they use women as objects.

Males with a prawn bite would probably have been cured, without even having to ask for cure; research studies would have been done, if necessary, to find cures. A woman was not treated, however, even when a cure was possible. The patient is reduced to a mere commodity and nothing else; the physician uses the aunt's treatment payments to fund his son's education.

This symbolism of woman as object is made particularly clear in the young doctor's using both his wife and her doll. But the aunt encourages her nieces' helplessness and even sacrifices her youngest niece in order to get even with the physicians, both of whom refuse to cure her. Ferre's story contains elements of mythical realism, yet it invites readers to examine personal motivation involved in power plays and warns of incorrect, even deadly, uses of various kinds of power.