Mary Daly, Radical Feminist Philosopher

Mary Daly, radical feminist philosopher and theologian, is the most passionate and uncompromising feminist alive. Throughout her 32-year career as a professor of theology at the Jesuit-run Boston College and as a prolific author of several books she has remained at the cutting-edge of women's liberation movement for the last several decades. This paper traces her life and struggles and discusses her evolving philosophy particularly its controversial aspects.

Early Life and Education

Mary Daly was born in New York on October 16, 1928 in an Irish Catholic working-class family. Not much information is available about her early life except that she started out as a perfectly normal, albeit unusually bright "good little girl" who wanted to study philosophy and theology. In her first book, the Church and the Second Sex (1968), Ms Daly writes, "My passion had been to study philosophy and theology. To a person who had grown up in the Catholic ghetto, theology meant "Catholic" theology." She started out her education by getting a B.A. English degree from the College of St. Rose, Albany, New York, her M.A. English from Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in religion from St. Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana.

Surprisingly, in the 1950s and the 1960s, there was no place in the United States where a female was allowed to study for the highest degree, i.e., the "canonical" Doctorate in the field of Sacred Theology. Mary Daly would settle for nothing less than the "highest degrees," and went to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland where the theological faculty was state-controlled and could not legally exclude women as per the law. At Friboug, she earned three of the highest degrees in Sacred (Catholic) Theology -- the Baccalaureate, the Licentiate, and the Doctorate -- and a Ph.D. In Philosophy.

Daly's time at Fribourg was both fruitful as well as frustrating. Besides earning her degrees, she also underwent great personal and intellectual growth at the University. She thrived in the intellectual freedom and the intensity of the academic environment at Fribourg and enjoyed the free exchange of ideas among friends beyond the constraint of the classroom. On the other hand, she often felt out of place in her all-male seminary classes; began to question the very merits of her chosen field of study and her belief in the Catholic faith began to waiver.

Career at Boston College

In 1966 Daly returned to the United States and took a teaching position at Boston College. It was the beginning of her long and eventful teaching career at the Jesuit-run College that featured a number of confrontations with the college academia (or, in the words of Daly -- the "academented bore-ocracy") finally ending in an acrimonious forced retirement in 1998.

At the start of her career at Boston College, Daly found herself in the midst of social upheaval of the 1960s: the civil rights and antiwar movements and at the vanguard of the women's liberation movement. Her first 'small step' in this direction was the publication of her first book, the Church and the Second Sex. The book was a ringing expose of the male supremacism and inherent patriarchy in organized Christianity. In reaction, the college administration threatened her with dismissal and served her with a terminal contract. Her termination became a cause celebre among supporters of Women's Liberation and resulted in a number of protests at the college and across the country. As a result, the college was forced to grant her tenure and she returned to teach in the fall of 1969.

Daly's Feminist Philosophy

Daly proclaims in one of her books, "Even if I were the only one, I would still be a Radical Feminist!" The extent of radicalism in her feminist philosophy is also reflected in her uncompromising assertion made in another work: "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."

Working from Within the System:

Such hard-core feminism in her philosophy, which leaves absolutely no room for compromise with the patriarchal world, however, has evolved over the years. In her first book-- the Church and the Second Sex (1968), for example, Daly had begun with the naive hope of working from within the system and reforming the blatantly patriarchal nature of Christianity that degrades women's humanity and undermines their spirit. She reviewed in the book the historical record of Christian theory and practice to highlight its inherent misogyny. She notes that Christianity has sought to oppress and deceive women from its very inception by putting up unattainable visions of the Virgin Mary as an example of the "good Christian woman," while also affirming that Mary was made pure only through the act of a male god and only for the sake of a male savior -- Jesus Christ. The exemplary woman in Christianity is, hence, depicted as passive, asexual, and submissive who is supposed to show patience and suffer silently in the face of oppression, awaiting some sort of reward in the life hereafter.

Post-Christian Feminism

The reaction of the Church and the academia to her first book convinced Daly about the futility of being a "Catholic (or Christian) Feminist" and in her next, and perhaps most famous work, Beyond God the Father (1973) she completely abandoned the hope of working from the system and of reforming a "fundamentally corrupt and corrosive institution." The book represents the first major step in the revelation and the dis-covery of a philosophy of women's liberation and contains the initial blueprint of Daly's feminist philosophy. In Beyond God the Father, the author outrightly rejects the Christian and other patriarchal modes of reasoning, and begins to set forth a "gynocentric" vision of life and the world.

Daly writes in Beyond that "the biblical and popular image of God as a great patriarch in heaven rewarding and punishing according to his mysterious and seemingly arbitrary will" has resulted in giving rise to a society in which the mechanisms for the oppression of women appear right and fitting. In other words, Christianity and the Bible give out a loud and clear message that, "If God in "his" heaven is a father ruling "his" people, then it is in the "nature" of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated." Going even further in her devastating critique of Christianity, Daly dubs the core of Christian worship -- the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as ritually re-enacted in the Eucharist -- as deathloving and necrophiliac, which she believes are also the hallmark of patriarchy.

All Religions are Patriarchal

Although most of Daly's ire is directed against Christianity in her initial writings, she has come to see all of the so-called other major religions such as buddhism, hinduism, islam, and judaism, and even non-religious secular philosophies including freudianism, jungianism, marxism, and maoismas mere "infrastructures of the edifice of patriarchy." It is this unbending belief about the patriarchal nature of all conventional religions and philosophies, which continues to stoke the fires of Daly's fury against such "tentacles of patriarchy" and inspires her to constantly fight for the reversal of all the wrongs done against women, liberate women's minds, bodies and spirits from oppression, demolish the long-held taboos of a patriarchal society, and continue to seek alteration of no less than the world civilization.

Other Destructive Aspects of Patriarchy

According to Daly, women are not the only victims of patriarchy; she believes that other societal evils such as racism, militarism, nationalism and environmental degradation are also manifestations of the "phallic culture." To those who seek to reform such patriarchal societies, Daly's message is that there is no possibility of redemption for a system which is "founded upon the degradation of the human species and its environment." Patriarchy perpetuates its crimes through "denial, tokenism, obfuscation and reversal" and traps its victims (particularly the women) in the semantic web of lies which, in the words of Daly, "constitutes the reality of the Foreground, and obscures ultimate reality, which is the Background." She advises women to take a leap of faith to break free from the necrophilic embrace of patriarchy to dis-cover their true human potential and "reclaim their primordial power, their gynergy, in order to spin new, gynocentric and biophilic realities."