the messengers of the Abingdon Association of Particular Baptist churches discussed the question: ‘How far women may speak in the church?’ Their agreed answer was that ‘they may not so speak as that their speaking shall show a not acknowledging of the inferiority of their sex and so be an usurping authority over the man.’2 The only people in the seventeenth century who came anywhere near making women equal with men were Diggers, Ranters and Quakers, who believed that men and women were perfectible on earth, could get back behind the Fall. Milton was more orthodox in this respect, and thought that the subordination antedated the Fall of Man. In 1680 Fox said ‘Neither did God set the man over the woman whilst they kept the image of God and obeyed his voice’ in Paradise. Nevertheless, twenty-four years earlier, in Milton’s lifetime, Fox had spoken rather differently, more like the Abingdon Baptists: ‘I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be silent…. If they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home.’3 Between the two statements I have quoted Fox had himself married.
So to criticize Milton because he stated a theory of male superiority is like criticizing him because he did not advocate votes or equal pay for women. No one, to my knowledge, in the seventeenth century claimed that women were wholly equal to men, just as no one, not even Levellers, seriously proposed to give them the vote. Edwards asked, as the height of irony, whether women should have political power, together with servants and paupers. Milton’s enemy Richard Leigh was not untypical when he wrote in 1675
The wife no office seems to have
But of the husband’s prime she-slave.4
The courtly Marquis of Halifax put it more agreeably in his Advice to a Daughter (1688), but what he said was not so very different.5 Consider the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson. She was clearly a stronger character than her husband. Yet she fully accepted the subordination of her sex, praising Queen Elizabeth for ‘her submission to her masculine and wise councillors’ (!). If we could date her Memoirs with more precision we might think she had been reading Paradise Lost just before she wrote.1
Let us try to put Milton back into history. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the emergence of new marriage patterns – a rejection of papal doctrines of the superiority of celibacy as well as of the traditional feudal concept which saw marriage as a property transaction, with love as something normally to be found outside marriage. The Puritan attitude towards women assumes the world of small household production, in which the wife had a position of authority over servants, apprentices and children, though in subordination to her husband. The state of matrimony was glorified, and heavy emphasis was laid on love in marriage (and therefore on monogamy), on freedom of choice in marriage (as against what Milton called the ‘savage inhumanity’ of direction of children by parents),2 on the wife as ‘help-meet’, as the junior partner in the household which contemporaries saw as a little church, a little state, a little school.3 These ideas are to be found in the Puritan guides to godliness, in the writings of William Perkins and William Gouge; they are also in Spenser and Shakespeare, in Roger Williams and Harrington.4 ‘He for God only, she for God in him’ expresses Spenser’s view of the relation of the sexes; and let us not forget The Taming of the Shrew. It was only after the family ceased to be the real productive unit in society that wives of more successful householders began to ape the habits and attitudes of their social betters, to cultivate white hands and vapours: their menfolk meanwhile gave them a sentimentalized elevation to compensate for their effective demotion from the productive process.5 The inequality was more apparent than real so long as the wife was the helpmeet of her husband in the family firm: deference to the middle-class lady only conceals her powerlessness once she has been cut off from production. Eve was a gardener.
Milton, an intellectual who wished to give reasons for what he believed, theorized about the male supremacy which no one denied. In the course of theorizing he shocked his contemporaries by being prepared to contemplate a situation in which the wife may ‘exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yield’. Then ‘a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female.’ This, however, he regarded as an exceptional case, though taking care to note examples of outstanding women in his Commonplace Book.1 He gave his youngest daughter, born in May 1652, the name of Deborah, the inspired poetess and judge of Israel who stirred the Israelites up to take arms against their oppressors.
Milton was also attacked because ‘all his arguments … prove as effectually that the wife may sue a divorce from her husband upon the same grounds.’2 In An Apology he argued that unchastity was worse in men than in women. We must see these attitudes in the light of the Protestant concept of the priesthood of all believers, which helped to enhance the status of women, for ‘the soul knows no difference of sex’;3 women too had consciences to which God might speak direct. Protestantism did a great deal for the education of girls. They must learn to read and write, if only to be able to read the Bible. Being able to read, they read other things as well. It was the Cavalier poets who in the seventeenth century had a low view of women, and who looked back to the golden age as a time of sexual promiscuity.4 As an example of an orthodox attitude towards marriage less elevated than Milton’s, consider the discussions between the Earl of Rochester and Gilbert Burnet in 1679. Rochester objected to Christian prohibitions on extra-marital sex, and to Anglican refusal of divorce. Burnet’s reply started from the sanctity of property. ‘Men have a property in their wives and daughters, so that to defile the one or corrupt the other is an unjust and injurious thing.’5
Milton, then, was far from unique in holding that women were inferior to men. The importance of keeping them in their place was confirmed for him, as for Lucy Hutchinson, by the shocking example of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. ‘How great mischief and dishonour’, Milton reflected in Eikonoklastes, ‘hath befallen to nations under the government of effeminate and uxorious magistrates, who being themselves governed at home under a feminine usurpation’ were incompetent to rule others. In the History of Britain Boadicea was chastised for usurping a masculine role, though other women were praised: Milton presumably approved of Deborah. Salmasius’s alleged deference to his wife was used against him: ‘In vain does he prattle about liberty in assembly and market place who at home endures the slavery most unworthy of man, slavery to an inferior.’ The criticism follows logically from Milton’s Biblical position – as does his ecstatic praise of the exception who proved his rule – Queen Christina of Sweden.1 She fortunately had no husband.
We know little about Milton’s reasons for marrying. At what Charles Diodati’s death meant for him we can only guess.2 In the Epitaphium Damonis Milton reflected on the hardness and loneliness of man’s life, on the instability of human affection (lines 106–11). The loss of Diodati may help to explain Milton’s brief flirtation with celibacy as an ideal. The idealization of chastity in Comus, however we interpret it, taken together with Comus’s paean in praise of fecundity, seems to hint at unresolved tensions. The additions to the version printed in 1637 may be intended to suggest a way out: chastity is far from precluding true marriage. At the end of the Epitaphium Damonis Diodati was admitted to the heavenly Bacchic orgies because he had been chaste. Virginity as an ideal was explicitly disavowed in the divorce tracts, where Milton went out of his way to correct St. Paul: marriage was not a defilement, ‘the Apostle … pronounces quite contrary to [the] Word of God.’3 The joke in Animadversions about nunneries providing ‘convenient stowage for their withered daughters’ hardly suggests an elevated view of chastity.4 The thirty-three-year-old bachelor may have decided that it was time for him to take a wife. In April 1642, when he was twitted with aspiring to marriage with a rich widow, he announced that he would prefer ‘a virgin of mean fortune honestly bred’. Perhaps the gay and lively Mary Powell was the next one he met. The angry gods had their revenge.5
