SOURCE: Nyquist, Mary. “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost,” In Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, edited by Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson, pp. 99-127. New York: Methuen, 1988.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1987, Nyquist contends that Speght's arguments for gender equality in A Muzzle for Melastomus place her work as one of the earliest feminist responses to Genesis and to John Milton's Paradise Lost.

So it continues to matter that Adam was formed first, then Eve. As a further means of taking the measure of Milton's interest in this priority, I would now like to discuss three seventeenth-century texts more favourably disposed towards an egalitarian interpretation of Genesis. Although research in this area is still underway, it is safe to say that Milton could not but have known that questions of priority figure prominently in the...