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Mary Daly died
Mary Daly, the extraordinarily creative feminist theologian, philosopher, and theorist, died yesterday. She expanded the minds of feminist academics, whether they acknowledged her or not in their work or their hearts, whether they agreed with her ideas or not. She was controversial to the nth degree.
After Daly’s most famous book, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, came out in 1978, I remember talking with my friend the art critic Arlene Raven about how the book changed our lives and how our writing would never be the same.
Daly’s work is fearless. That adjective can be applied to the publications of VERY few scholars. Other applicable adjectives: stunning, poetic, passionate, exploratory. And out of this world . . . of tame, tamed, and taming “right” ways to be a scholar.
In a short post at http://catholicanarchy.org/, its author Mary Hunt reminds the reader that Daly “always advised women to throw our lives as far as they would go.” Mary Daly, thank you for helping me to travel much farther than the conventions of professions, sex, and gender tend to take a woman.
- January 4, 2010
- Filed under: Bookshelf, art, and media
- Comments 1
Absolutely fearless, good word! I owe a great deal to Mary Daly. Today’s news is taking me on a profound memory lane of my own feminist development. Gyn/Ecology was the cornerstone, the “word” in the beginning. Over thirty years ago, my lover at the time brought that book into my house and I realized that I wasn’t alone, that there was a bodacious global thought and tribe of which I was a part, and to which I will always belong. Mary gave us voice, and brilliantly threw the bell curve way out for the rest of us to have safe havens as feminists. I even wore the double axe back in those days, a small gold pendant, showing that I was with that philosophical tribe. I’ll have to look in the bottom of my jewelry box to see if it’s still there! But, unlike many scholars who borrowed from Mary Daly, I did not stop giving her credit and invoking her name at every possible turn. Just last night, I posted an old nytimes review of her Wickedary on my facebook, what synchronicity — I think it comes from my “pure lust.”
ps: having phone calls with old Mary Daly friends today.