The Miltonic Ideal: A Paradigm for the Structure of Relations between Men and Women in Academia

Abstract

As WOMEN ENTER ACADEMIA in larger numbers, Eve intrudes into a previously cloistered male garden. The changes effected are profound, and in some respects parallel to the changes wrought in Adam's life by Eve's creation in Paradise Lost. Contemporary university campuses are not conducive to annihilating all that's made / To a green Thought in a green shade, and PMLA hardly pretends to be pastoral. Still, a male professor of little more than a decade ago could regard his academy as a place free of the disturbing, if livening, influence of serious competition with a female peer. And although the mystique of the good old days in academia is the stuff of myth, many a professor of humanities might often think, with Marvell, of the relative simplicity of that other life.