Background

Mary Daly was born on October 16, 1928, in Schenectady, New York, United States. She is a daughter of Frank X. and Anna Catherine Morse Daly.

Education

Mary Daly was educated in Catholic schools. She studied at the College of Saint Rose where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1950. Later she studied at the Catholic University of America where she received a Master of Arts degree in 1952. Daly also attended Saint Mary's College and received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in religion in 1954. In 1963, she earned her Doctor of Theology degree from the University of Fribourg and in 1964 she received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in sacred theology and philosophy in 1965.

Career

Mary Daly started her career as a teacher of Philosophy and Theology at Cardinal Cushing College in 1954. She held this post until 1959 and then participated in Junior Year Abroad programs in Switzerland where she was a teacher of Philosophy. In 1966, Daly took up a post of an assistant professor at Boston College. In 1969, she was appointed as an associate professor of theology there. In 1975, Daly was denied promotion to a full professorship as a result of her published books and articles. However, university officials eventually gave in after another round of protests.

Daly refused to admit male students to some of her classes at Boston College because their presence inhibited class discussion. As a result, a discrimination claim against the college by two male students was backed by the Center for Individual Rights in 1998. After that Daly was absent from class and Boston College removed her tenure rights, citing a verbal agreement by Daly to retire. She brought suit against the college, however, her request for an injunction was denied by Middlesex Superior Court Judge. This legal battle was settled in 2001 when Daly agreed to retire. However, some believe that Daly was forced to leave Boston College.

Mary Daly published her first book The Church and the Second Sex in 1968. Later she wrote such books as Beyond God the Father, Websters' first new intergalactic wickedary of the English language and Quintessence: Realizing the Archaic Future. Her last book Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big was published in 2006. Daly also wrote articles and reviews for Commonweal, New Yorker, Woman of Power, National Catholic Reporter, Quest, Social Policy, and other journals. She also contributed the piece "Women and the Catholic church" to the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement.

Achievements

• Mary Daly was an American philosopher, educator, writer and radical feminist who has become a significant voice in feminist thought. Her most famous books are The Church and the Second Sex, Beyond God the Father and Amazon Grace.
  
  Mary Daly radical ideas continue to generate spirited responses among feminists and nonfeminists alike. After her death, Daly's papers were contributed to the Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History at Smith College.

Works

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• book

  • Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism

    (Mary Daly's New Intergalactic Introduction explores her p...)

    1978
  • Quintessence...Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto

    (Radical feminist Daly's latest expose of the abuses women...)

    1998
  • Outercourse: The Bedazzling Voyage, Containing Recollections from My Logbook of a Radical Feminist Philosopher

    (The author of Beyond God the Father and Gyn/Ecology blend...)

    1992
  • The Church and the Second Sex

    (First published in 1968, The Church and the Second Sex re...)

    1968
  • Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big

    (In her signature style, revolutionary Mary Daly takes you...)

    2006
  • Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation 1973
  • Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language 1987

Religion

Mary Daly received an education in traditional Catholic thought and was inspired by the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. In 1971, she left the Catholic church. Daly increasingly identified herself as "post-Christian" as her own theology evolved.

In her early works, Mary Daly sought to change religion and create an equal place for women in Catholicism. Later her view of religion changed. She said that organized religion as inherently oppressive toward women. She eventually gave up on theology, believing it to be hopelessly patriarchal. Daly also advocated the release of nuns from the cloister into the service of their societies and championed universal coeducation.

Views

A principal agenda of Daly's philosophical project is to reveal the structures and myths within patriarchy which degrade all, but especially women's, humanity. She criticized the "Equal Rights" feminist framework in her book Gyn/Ecology. Her argument was that the equality framework serves to distract women from the radical goal of altering or abolishing patriarchy as a whole, directing them instead towards gaining reforms within the existing system. According to Daly, such reforms leave women vulnerable because, though they grant nominal legal equality with men, the larger structures of patriarchy are left intact, and the later repeal of reforms is always possible.

In Gyn/Ecology, Daly claimed that male culture was the direct, evil opposite of female nature and that the ultimate purpose of men was the death of both women and nature. She held the view that men are parasites that feed off women's energy to fuel their destructive activities and constricting thoughts. One of Daly's claims was that, before patriarchy, women existed as "wild" and "lusty" beings in a matriarchy where they reproduced through parthenogenesis without the need for sperm. Her insistence that the lives of women are intimately connected with nature in the biosphere has contributed greatly to the movement known as “em-feminism." Daly would later claim that men should be eliminated to save nature. She called for creative and independent women to exorcise the stifling image of the Eternal Feminine by "raising up their own image" and fulfilling their potential.

Daly displays a negative opinion on transidentity. She lists it as "a male problem" and claims that the hormones that some trans people take in are proof that they are living in "artificial physical condition".

Quotations: "Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults - is on a psychic level, a battered woman."

"There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so."

"If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination."

"My fundamental interest is the women's revolution, which I see as the radical source of possibility for other forms of liberation from oppressive structures. I am interested precisely in the spiritual dimension of women's liberation, in its transforming potential in relation to religious consciousness and the forms in which this consciousness expresses itself. This is not ‘one area’ of theology; rather, it challenges the whole patriarchal religion."

"We are aware that the gods of patriarchy are pale derivatives and reversals of ancient yet always Present Goddess(es). We suspect that phallocentric writers and artists who have even a glimmer of insight are sometimes made uncomfortable by their own state of deception. Those who have any awareness of the heinous crime of reversal which is patriarchy must be in a state of deep conflict and fear of...Her."

"Originally, it was believed that witches possessed the power of glamour and according to the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, witches by their glamour could cause the male 'member' to disappear. In modern usage, this meaning has almost disappeared into the background and the power of the term is masked and suffocated by such foreground images as those associated with glamour magazine."

"I don't think about men. I really don't care about them. I'm concerned with women's capacities, which have been infinitely diminished under patriarchy. Not that they've disappeared, but they've been made subliminal. I'm concerned with women enlarging our capacities, actualizing them. So that takes all my energy."

"Women who are Pirates in a phallocratic society are involved in a complex operation. First, it is necessary to Plunder – that is, righteously rip off – gems of knowledge that the patriarchs have stolen from us. Second, we must Smuggle back to other women our Plundered treasures. In order to invent strategies that will be big and bold enough for the next millennium, it is crucial that women share our experiences: the chances we have taken and the choices that have kept us alive. They are my Pirate's battle cry and a wake-up call for women who I want to hear."

Membership

Mary Daly was a member of the American Academy of Religion, American Association of University Professors, American Association of University Women and the National Organization for Women. She also was a member of the advisory board of Feminists For Animal Rights, a group that is now defunct.

Personality

Mary Daly was an ethical vegetarian and animal rights activist. She was an enthusiastic person, supremely self-confident and generous. Strongly intuitive, but also used to the solitary work of a philosopher, she could be impatient. Daly was capable of incredible kindness, taking her students to dinner and creating academic. Those who knew her said that Daly's greatest talent was her brilliance at inspiring generations of university students as well as those with whom she came into contact on the lecture circuit to become involved in feminism.

Physical Characteristics: Mary Daly had short hair and blue eyes. People who saw Mary Daly say that her face beamed, as unstressed as a child, only a shaking hand as she pours the tea betrays any physical weakness.

Quotes from others about the person

• Village Voice: "Daly is the ultimate Christian feminist. What other radical feminists have revealed by analyzing patriarchal society's political, economic, social, and sexual institutions, Daly does for the spiritual institution on which Western civilization is founded."
  
  Carol J. Adams: "Daly reminds us that it does none of us any good to mince words, to be humble or hold back speaking the truth."
  
  Carol Anne Douglas: "Daly's faith in the future bespeaks her isolation, and the isolation of many radical feminists, in the present. She is rightly angry that some radical feminist books are no longer in print and numerous women's bookstores have gone out of business. But when Daly is angry, she is never simply angry. Always she finds joy as well as rage in radical feminist knowledge; always she leads beyond the anger to the joy."
  
  Publishers Weekly: "Daly illuminates connections among mythology, religion and sociopolitical events with a piercing gaze and a pointing finger."

Interests

• Philosophy of value, feminist theology

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Aquinas, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber

• Writers

  Virginia Woolf

Connections

Father:

Frank X.

Mother:

Anna Catherine Daly

References

• Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich Although women and men have different relationships to language and to each other, traditional theories of rhetoric do not foreground such gender differences. Krista Ratcliffe argues that because feminists generally have not conceptualized their language theories from the perspective of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric and composition scholars must construct feminist theories of rhetoric by employing a variety of interwoven strategies.
  1996
• Philosophers and Religious Leaders: An Encyclopedia of People Who Changed the World How did Elijah Muhammad's establishment of the Nation of Islam affect the civil rights movement in the United States? Philosophers and Religious Leaders answers that question and others as it presents 200 leaders whose lives and work have greatly influenced the world we live in today.
  1999