Mary Daly (October 16, 1928 — January 3, 2010): Sister, Activist, Scholar, Philosopher, Historian and Sage

I first read Mary Daly in 1978, her flagship book “Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism.” Robin Morgan wrote an homage to her in a recent blog post:

Mary Daly, feminist philosopher. Had she lived to witness these days, the ferocity of her intellect would have relished demolishing the Trumpists’ inversions and reversals, and through her books we can still be in conversation with her mind. Mary wrote of reversal as one of the four central methods of patriarchal mystification, along with erasure, false polarization, and divide and conquer. Even in her early work, as she freed herself from being a radical Catholic theologian with multiple doctor-of-divinity degrees, this theme appears.

Mary noticed. She noticed that Adam gives birth to Eve, Zeus to Athena, that the body and blood of the Eucharist inverts the actual body that brings and feeds life with its own flesh and milk: the female body. Mary named false conclusion and false polarization. To Orwell’s fictional list of phrases — war is peace, freedom is slavery, the joy camp is a forced labor camp — Mary added current real-life examples: rest cure, finishing schools, intensive care, housewife, the natural look. Orwell had warned that ”ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving higher brain centers at all.” Against such practices Mary urged what she termed “positive paranoia.”

What Robin Morgan doesn’t mention is that Mary Daly was a Catholic nun and scholar, who left her vocation and discarded the habit after learning, reading, researching far too much about the deep misogyny running throughout Church dogma and doctrine, the Church Fathers, Jerome, Aquinas, Autustine et al, the resulting Church policies as regard women, and the virulent misogyny (and actual Rape Culture) of the scriptures themselves. She has been the bane of the two previous popes, who have issued Bulls and encyclicals just about her and her largely feminist lesbian following in the States, cautioning them against falling into ‘mortal error’ by following such writings and thinking such thoughts, and basically threatening them with Hell. To which Daly and her fey sisters of course replied with the equivalent of ‘make my day.’

Here is the full text of “Gyn/Ecology” but without the footnotes, citations sources and references.

https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/mary-daly-gyn-ecology-the-metaethics-of-radical-feminism.pdf

It, like Robin Morgan’s ‘Monster,’ is a kind of anthem, battle cry and rallying call. It certainly served to help coalesce my thoughts on, and understanding of, long-held Church-sponsored dictates on women in Western society.