A Feminist’s Feminist Remembering Mary Daly, 1928-2010

A Feminist’s Feminist

Remembering Mary Daly, 1928-2010

By Mary E. Hunt

I read Mary Daly’s book Beyond God the Father in hardback while the ink was still wet in 1973. While the rest of my graduate theological education is a blur of books, I can still feel the excitement in my fingers as I turned each brilliantly written page. I knew that my world would never be the same. Thanks to Mary Daly, the world at large isn’t the same either.

A feminist philosopher par excellence, Mary created intellectual and spiritual space where none existed for women before. In her courageous, outrageous and prophetic work she put her finger on a central tenet of patriarchy: “If God is male, then the male is God.”  No tinkering with petty problems for Mary: She took on the Divine, the Higher Power. Contra millennia of religious sexism, she asserted that women are full human beings who can and should direct their own lives. Religious excuses for women’s oppression would never pass unnoticed, unchallenged, again.

She began life as a “good Catholic girl,” brought up in a working-class neighborhood inSchenectady, N.Y., the only daughter of older Irish parents. Her mother, Anna, insisted to Mary that she wanted one child, a girl; in fact she wanted Mary. That motherly love permitted Mary to weather many a storm. A combination of genius and unwillingness to postpone insisting on what she knew to be true characterized Mary’s complex life of struggle, conviction and yes, joy.

Mary completed doctorates in theology and philosophy in Switzerland in the mid-1960s, when most American universities did not admit women into such graduate programs. She was inRome for a month during the Second Vatican Council where she saw up close the costumed eminences of Catholicism—the pope, cardinals and bishops—in all their patriarchal plumage. They made decisions, while well-educated women watched with Mary from the ecclesial peanut gallery. The moral and spiritual hideousness of the scene informed her critique, sparked her activism and resulted in her first major book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968).

In 1971, Mary became the first woman in 336 years to be invited to preach at Harvard’sMemorial Church. She used the occasion to invite—incite, really—many women and a few men to walk out, leaving behind the Gods of their fathers. It was a symbolic action—one prominent Protestant woman admits now that she went back inside for coffee as soon as the protest was over—but it reverberates still in the freedom women feel to leave, question, denounce and/or recreate their religious traditions.

Mary Daly’s subsequent writings, especially Gyn/Ecology (1978) and Pure Lust (1984), are efforts to connect the dots between the oppression of women and the pillage of the planet, andbetween abstract theory and concrete women’s experiences. She was a philosopher who saw the intersections of sexism with racism, class differences, sexualities, colonialism and ecocide before the rest of us did. She did not solve each issue fully to our postmodern satisfaction—indeed, her critics raise important points about many matters she addressed—but she understood the link between women’s well-being and planetary survival long before Kyoto or Copenhagen.

Mary’s work was foundational, so basic that she had to cowrite (with Jane Caputi) theWickedary (1987) to define or redefine the words she needed to articulate her vision for a just and biophilic globe. She wrenched words such as “hag,” “crone,” and “lesbian” from their patriarchal contexts and reshaped them positively, lest women continue to internalize oppression. Her approach to language was playful, on target and adopted by many. Her reversals of patriarchal logic were the work of an excavator, digging up and setting aside what was in women’s way in order to clear space for more people to live well.

In subsequent autobiographical works, including Outercourse (1992), Quintessence (1998), and Amazon Grace (2006), she catalogued her adventures as she lectured about and lived radical feminism. She had fun doing so. She was a performance artist at teach-ins and workshops. She drew attention to the unjust structures and ridiculous claims of “academentia,” always offering imaginative, if wild, alternatives. Not even her closest friends accused her of being easy to get along with, but we all appreciated her Irish wit and her relentless efforts to make change.

Mary was Socratic in her approach to teaching, frequently disarming students by asking not only what they thought but what they felt. She taught at Boston College from the 1960s, when it was still a mostly male undergraduate institution, until 2000, when she unsuccessfully defended her decision to teach women and men separately. Boston College had tenured and promoted her over the years after their initial efforts to deny both, but in the midst of the new millennium’s cultural war, a right-wing organization put forth a male student to challenge her decision to teach men in colloquia apart from women. The university settled the ensuing lawsuit and Mary retired. But she kept teaching and writing, enjoying the occasional radio or television appearance and finding her way on the Internet.

Mary Daly was a mystic at heart, valuing intuition as much and sometimes more than intellect. She got “vibes” about places and people that informed her analyses and choices. Her meticulously footnoted work always included references to conversations with friends whom she loved, though we all knew it was her cats who captured her heart. She taught my daughter to meow before she could speak.

Despite her international reputation for taking on patriarchs and their institutions, Mary was a shy and modest person who lived simply. She was nocturnal, often waxing poetic on late night phone calls to sleepy friends (I was one of them). She was exuberant about swimming in the lake behind her apartment. Her joy was to sit on a blanket under a tree and watch the clouds.

Mary died in early January after several years of debilitating illness, which she endured with characteristic humor and fortitude. A friend was reading from the Wickedary as she passed over. While by patriarchal measures, there were no immediate survivors, the reality is that she is survived by many circles of women and yes, some men, who took her advice to throw their lives as far as they could go, just as she did.

Scholars will debate her work for generations to come. I predict a cottage industry of panels, dissertations, and anthologies will emerge. But she really wanted to create a “hedge school,” modeled after the Irish ones of the 18th century set up to educate rural poor people in barns and fields. She believed in women sharing stories, sparking one another’s ideas. It seems that every feminist has a Mary Daly story, and virtually every one includes how deeply and personally Mary Daly “changed my life.” What most don’t say is that they changed their own lives because Mary made space for them.

Now she joins the feminist panoply of foresisters that includes Mary Wollstonecraft, Matilda Jocelyn Gage, Harriet Tubman, and Simone de Beauvoir. She is a feminist’s feminist. We who have more space in which to live and work are proof that Mary Daly’s daring and dauntless efforts to change the world succeeded beyond even her wildest dreams.

MARY E. HUNT is a feminist theologian and co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Tags: Feminism