Where no man has gone before: the be-dazzling voyage of Mary Daly

What happens to nice Catholic girls? The dream of reason creates monsters. Let us then  become monsters and rejoice.

Mary Daly was born in Schenectady, New York, on October 16, 1928. Educated in Catholic schools, she went into the lion’s den in a time when young Catholic women all around the world were taking the vow, taking the veil, entering convents as nuns, women religious taking vows of chastity, obedience and poverty. Mary Daly wanted to study theology. To teach theology. To do theology right in the heart of  a patriarchal church. She had her precedents: the women doctors of the church like Teresa of Avila and Therese of Lisieux and Catherine of Siena. But she didn’t want to wait  400 years or so to  be canonised and credited as a doctor of the church. She received her first Ph.D. from St. Mary’s College/Notre Dame University in 1954. There was nowhere for her to teach. She wasn’t a priest. She wasn’t male.  She also received doctorates in theology and philosophy from the University of Fribourg in 1963 and 1965. After 1966 she became a member of the theology department of Boston College. One wonders if Boston College ever realised  who and what she was. The lioness had commandeered the den.

“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.”

She went on to document the history of misogynism in the church, from the patristic writings onward. She raged against the   notion that the true nature of women is to be self-sacrificing, passive, and docile, and that women are fulfilled only in physical or spiritual motherhood. But back then she also  believed the church could and would change. She urged the church  to end discrimination against women in the ministry, eliminating the barriers that isolate nuns from the world, and tackled the absurd  beliefs underpinning androcentric theology, that male-centred  universe where the mythical phallus rules. She detested the attribution of male gender to a transcendent God and the identification of women with sexuality, matter, and evil.

The fact is that we live in a profoundly anti-female society, a misogynistic “civilization” in which men collectively victimize women, attacking us as personifications of their own paranoid fears, as The Enemy. Within this society it is men who rape, who sap women’s energy, who deny women economic and political power.

She published to acclaim and protest. Then she found herself on the outside. 

Outrage followed the publication of The Church and the Second Sex. Daly was threatened with the loss of her job at Boston College and was finally granted tenure only after months of student protests and widespread media publicity. The experience radicalized her view of the oppressiveness of patriarchal structures and  changed her from a reformist Catholic to a post-Christian radical feminist.

Mary Daly spent her life throwing caution where she could find it later; she has been an inspiration to me throughout my adult life.  My gratitude for her life goes beyond words. Hers were those of an authentic Spinster, weaving a new language which leaves those who read her breathless with hope.  Once read, her seminal work, Gyn/Ecology can never be forgotten.  I mourn her passing but celebrate her unique & extraordinary life, lived with incomparable courage.

In her next book, Beyond God the Father (1973), Daly went in and disrupted the absurd arguments that held up patriarchal religion. Pillars tumbled as she wrote; the roof caved in. A theologcal earthquake followed. She argued that  by legitimating male superiority and displacing evil onto the female as the prototypical Other, patriarchal religion not only oppresses and silences half the human race but is responsible for  social structures and ways of thinking that produce racism, genocide, and war. She rejected not only the gender identification of God but the concept of God as a static noun (supreme being) rather than active verb (Be-ing).

And she would say again and again that we underestimate misogyny and talk about the Burning Times, shouting to be heard over the voices of male academics and  statistically thwarted historians who wanted proofs and  records and details and numbers. Daly  looked back and saw women burning, over and over again, burning women disappearing from  history, women’s lives and horrible deaths unrecorded, the hatred of women that  reached back to the brutal dawn of patriachy.

In the years following the publication of Beyond God the Father Daly left behind all Christian symbolism and rooted her theology completely in women’s lived and bodily experience. Gyn/Ecology (1978) was concerned with the process of women’s “becoming” (which Daly described in mythic terms as a journey to the Otherworld) and with the demonic obstacles to that process, the laughable myths and sadistic death-dealing practices of patriarchal culture.

“Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a radical feminist pirate and cultivating the courage to win. The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin.’”

Daly explored the deadly “foreground” myths that shackle women’s minds and recounted the psychological and physical destruction of women by such practices as  suttee, footbinding, genital mutilation, witchburning, slavery and American gynecology.

The journey of women into Selfhood, full moral agency and creative  autonomy preoccupied her more and more. Her vision moved from dystopian toward a wildly imagined utopia for  women  travelling and spiralling  deeper in a labyrinth of language and  creating  that utopia as they travel. Having named and described the androcentric lunacies that block the passage to female Selfhood, Daly then charted the deeper passages through which women spin and spiral into a parallel universe of women-identified and woman-honoring consciousness. More than any other radical feminist thinker, Daly reclaimed language–the “power of naming’ and linked it to the  inventive recovery of the hitherto unimaginable. Her vision set the drearier fields of academic philosophy alight. Her  ways of  reaching out opened  up work that was ‘incandescent, metaphoric, alliterative, playful, inventive, punning, charged with sheer energy, anger, and humor’. She is the First of  Our Metapatriarchal Thinkers and Be-ings.

Pure Lust (1984), subtitled Elemental Feminist Philosophy, was concerned with exploding ontology or the philosophy of being.  She rejected and expelled the objectified noun being as an inadequate expression of the constantly creating and unfolding Powers of Be-ing, and she defined the ultimate concern of feminist philosophy as “biophilic participation in Be-ing.” Be-ing was not divided from, exiled from,  nature in Daly’s thinking; Be-ing was to be found in the elemental nature of the Self, the earth, and the cosmos. Intercoonectedness was all.

Her writing became more anarchic and wicked and uncontained, unconstrained, unmanageable, unbearable, unforced and unbound as she aged. Which is how it should be. She was travelling through language and galaxies of meaning at the speed of light. Or dark.

Daly’s Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary is an indictment of patriarchy and male dominated institutions in which Daly harnesses the power of naming to make her point. In the book, she defines “positively revolting hag,” a term she uses to describe herself. For Daly it means, “a stunning, beauteous Crone; one who inspires positive revulsion from phallic institutions and morality….”

Women operating on patriarchy’s boundaries, she wrote, can spiral into freedom by renaming and reclaiming an ancient woman-centered reality that was stolen and eradicated by patriarchy. We can  start over in the devastated places.

Writing in The New Yorker in 1996, Daly articulated her thoughts on the empowerment of women.

“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 wake-up call for women who I want to hear.”

She was an unapologetic radical feminist who put women first and never backed down from a position in order to avoid alienating men or women less radical than she (and face it, that’s most people), a woman who once described herself as a “positively revolting hag” — and meant it in a good way.

Feminist philosopher Mary Daly fought repeatedly with Boston College from 1966 to 2001 over her controversial books, her status as a professor and her freedom to reserve some classes for women only. In 1999, Daly took a leave of absence from Boston College instead of allowing men to enroll in her feminist ethics course. Daly, who has taught female-only courses for 25 years, insisted men would cause female students to be less open and would be disruptive. Her death  followed two years of ill health, the last battle in this  galaxy perhaps.

And that brings us to the other thing about Daly: the language. Mary Daly took the words of the English language, moved them around, combined them creatively, capitalized whatever she felt deserved to be capitalized, redefined terms with wild abandon, and just expected her readers to keep up. Reading her prose was a bit like being caught in an avalanche, and I was known more than once to roll my eyes at what seemed like lexical excess. But there was also something delightful and playful about all of it.

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.