Mary Daly is dead

Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors reports that radical feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly is dead at the age of 81. In the comments to Crawford's post, Ann Bartow of FLP links to this obituary at Reclusive Leftist.

Mary Daly was a colossus. She was an absolutely towering influence on modern feminist thought. If you’re a feminist alive today, then Mary Daly influenced you. Even if you’ve never heard of her, even if you’ve never read her books — she influenced you.

Crawford links to Daly's obituary at National Catholic Reporter online.

Daly most often contemplated the divine essence as a verb, Be-ing itself, so that worship is "not kneeling in front of a so-and-so but swirling in energy." Her language echoed quantum physics, and she was flattered if you said so: "I do think about space-time a great deal," she admitted. "It's a kind of mysticism which is also political."

The Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Modern Western Theology also has an interesting biography.As in life, in death Mary Daly remains controversial. Her Wikipedia biography, while grossly oversimplified, gives some sense of the controversies that surrounded her.

In Gyn/Ecology, Daly wrote that the number of people killed as witches during the Witch Hunt in early modern Europe added up to nine million people, mostly women. This high figure, which is rejected by most researchers,^[12] caused her to coin the term 'Gynocide' and to draw comparisons with the Holocaust. Nearly all estimates today range from 60,000 to 100,000 people killed between the 14th and 18th centuries.^[13]

Also in Gyn/Ecology, Daly asserted her negative view of transsexual people, whom she referred to as "Frankensteinian." She labels transsexualism a "male problem" and claimed that post-operative transsexuals exist in a "contrived and artifactual condition."^[14] Daly was also the dissertation advisor to Janice Raymond, whose dissertation, published in 1979 as The Transsexual Empire, is critical of "transsexualism." Transsexual activist Riki Wilchins has accused Daly of being transphobic.

In a personal letter to Daly, published after four months without any reply, Audre Lorde expressed a fondness for Daly's work, but expressed concern over Gyn/Ecology, citing homogenizing tendencies, and a refusal to acknowledge the "herstory and myth" of women of color. ^[15] The letter, and Daly's decision not to publicly respond, greatly affected the reception of Daly's work among other feminist theorists, and has been described as a "paradigmatic example of challenges to white feminist theory by feminists of color in the 1980s." ^[16]

I would say that one of the biggest reasons that Daly remains controversial is the utter seriousness with which she took women's lives and patriarchal oppression. For an analysis of Daly's work that gives due respect to Mary Daly's work, while also criticizing it, I would recommend the anthology Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly edited by philosophers Sarah Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, which was reviewed by Carol Anne Douglas in off our backs. I admit that it's been sitting on my bookshelf for years, and I've kept it because it looks so interesting. When I'm finished reading it, you're welcome to borrow it.

In the meantime, you can get some of the flavor of Mary Daly's work by visiting her web site.