SOURCE: Polydorou, Desma. “Gender and Spiritual Equality in Marriage: A Dialogic Reading of Rachel Speght and John Milton.” Milton Quarterly 35, no. 1 (March 2001): 22-32.

In the following excerpt, Polydorou contrasts Speght's and John Milton's interpretations of biblical passages on gender roles and Christian marriage in order to argue that Speght far more than Milton should be seen as being at the forefront of seventeenth-century articulations of gender equality.

While Milton may have been the first seventeenth-century canonical English writer to advance an arguably egalitarian view of woman,¹ he is preceded and in some instances surpassed in this achievement by a number of early seventeenth-century women writers. Following Mary Nyquist's initial analysis of the contrast between Milton and Speght, I will contrast Milton's views on gender with those of Rachel Speght, whose work appeared approximately thirty years before Milton's divorce tracts. Although Speght's writing is qualified and complicated by contemporary...