I think a lot about Eve, the biblical first woman.

In my teaching of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) - the epic poem in twelve books recounting the Fall of Man - I discuss with my students whether Milton’s portrayal of Eve can be viewed as run-of-the-mill sexism, full misogyny or as possibly containing traces of feminism. At the crux of the debate is Milton’s imagining of Eve’s ambition at the beginning of time, to leave Adam for a few hours to go off gardening on her own. Where the skeleton action in Genesis jumps from Eve’s creation (from Adam’s rib), to her eating the forbidden fruit - bringing sin and death to mankind - Milton fleshes out the plot with description, character and conversation, giving a humanist dimension to Eve’s consequential act.

In Book 9, Eve boldly speaks to Adam first, to broach the subject of a brief separation so they can get more done: ‘Let us divide our labours.’ She claims they distract each other with their flirting: ‘Looks intervene and smiles, or […] Casual discourse draw on, which intermits / Our day’s work brought to little.’ Unmistakably, Milton’s Eve wants to do more than be Adam’s appendage; she feels called to work independently. As Adam warns his ‘associate sole’ of the evil that threatens them, Eve argues they can’t know their own worth unless they are tested: ‘And what is faith, love, virtue unassayed?’ Eve questions their ‘condition’ living in ‘fear of harm’, and implores Adam not to imagine that God made them so ‘imperfect’ or ‘frail’. As the story goes, Eve proves Adam right, letting herself and all mankind down. She is persuaded to sin by Satan, who comes to her ‘uncalled’ and disguised in the ‘lovely’ form of the serpent - a ‘burnished’ and ‘surging maze’ with ‘tongue / Organic’. Seduced by ‘sovereign’ thoughts, Eve eats the ‘fruit divine’.

‘Eve Tempted by the Serpent’. William Blake, 1799-1800.

In Milton’s telling, Adam laments her weakness with a rhetorical strike at the heart of womanhood: ‘O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give ear / To that false worm.’ Eve’s ‘evil’ lapse leaves the reader to ponder a timeless ‘chicken and egg’ paradox: Which came first - Eve or evil? Or are they one and the same? Was the evil in her seeking independence (going off alone) or in seeking knowledge and promotion (eating the fruit) - or both? Each time I encounter this moment, I marvel at the clever contrivance of a story that makes Woman the scapegoat for original sin. Her punishment, of course, is eternal submission to man’s ‘will’ - ‘he over thee shall rule.’ A fitting punishment, perhaps, for the sinfulness of any female ambition to work or govern.

At the other end of time - just this week - my mother emailed me an uplifting video that bespeaks the lasting but shifting shadow of Eve for women who have aspired over centuries to work and lead. My mother, a career nurse, forwarded the video to a group of women, with the energetic subject ‘MUST WATCH’. It presents a gallery of images of current female heads of state around the world, to the sound of an epic battle-style score. It begins with these elliptical remarks: ‘While the world has been distracted… by the noise of all those resistant to change… Change has been happening anyway…’. One after the other, for two and half minutes, the cumulative effect of their faces is stirring. Pay attention. Women are leading. Calling all Eves.