RIP Mary Daly

[Sappho]

A long time shero!


http://www.365gay.com/news/daly-femi...paratist-dies/




“An outspoken lesbian-feminist and separatist, Daly provoked outrage by challenging established ideas and institutions that she considered destructive to women’s power and creativity.

“From organized religion to the university world she calls “academentia,” to men themselves, Daly dissected the “death-loving” culture of patriarchy and its effects on the minds and hearts of women. However, her brilliant body of work was far more than a litany of complaints. It was a joyously iconoclastic search for liberation, and an exploration of a hypothetical women-centered landscape where patriarchal domination has lost its power.

Daly came out publicly as a lesbian in the early 1970s. Always a holistic thinker, she never regarded her lesbianism as merely a sexual identity. It became part of her redefinition of the universe in terms of the feminine.”

Daly had a stormy 33-year tenure at the Jesuit university.

She challenged the patriarchy of the Roman Catholic church in her writings. She said she barred men from her class because women did not freely exchange ideas with them present, though she did privately tutor men.

In 1999, the university ordered her to accept a male student who threatened to sue. She took a leave of absence and filed a lawsuit. It was settled in 2001 with her retirement.

[Hildegard]

Sappho, don't get mad at me. Cuz I like to talk about this stuff.

Mary Daly was an interesting, feisty woman, but I never liked her, and here's why. She was intolerant, deep down. I just can't help but think her ideas and zeal were generated by a wellspring of negativity. Ask any transgender activist what I mean by this; she really looked down on them and said and wrote some pretty dismissive things about them. To this day I think trannies have had the hardest (not to mention most dangerous) time with acceptance even in the gay community and people like Daly were a big reason for this.

And the irony that she stayed 30 yrs at Boston College - an all-male, Jesuit institution when she started there - is pretty startling. She wrote volumes about the evils of patriarchy and its aggressive bent on the destruction of women, and yet the Jesuits - an all-male order of priest-intellectuals - gave her a forum for writing and lecturing on her theories for three decades. (It bears mentioning that the Jesuits are not yr run-o'-the-mill priests; in the U.S. they tend to be progressive more than not. There's an inside Catholic joke that most Jesuits are atheists.)

I'm not saying she was a hypocrite. She probably enjoyed the irony of her position there, and probably figured it was the same anywhere and she might as well teach there as any place else. But I do suspect she was a bit (at least) intellectually dishonest, because she knew that something like this:

If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.

was just plain absurd. She said it to get attention.

Anyway, like I said, she was interesting. And yeah, RIP.

[Hildegard]

OK, I will admit she said something pretty great: "To be is, in the fullest sense, to sin." Which I totally agree with.

[Sappho]

I'm with ya on some of that. That's what I liked, her feisty, outspoken part, gutsy. She brought up ideas and thinking that no one else would dared to say decades ago.

As far as transexuals go...they certainly do have the most difficult and dangerous time living in the world. But there's much more to it than anything Mary Daly did. Beyond a certain generation and more broadly educated, now days average folks don't even know who she is. Much less what she wrote. (Do they??) I think people just have thinking about transgender people without influence. Among the lesbian gay community, there's all sorts of issues for like and dislike. Especially when you get to the fringe of separatism. I have many mixed thoughts that I have to keep in check myself. All of which are ultimately overriden by my belief in basic human rights.

Of course she knew those remarks were absurd. But remember this was a time when we first put a man on the moon and there were bumperstickers about, "If we can put one man on the moon, why can't we put them all there?" Absurdity to attract attention to an issue is a long time practice in the politics of protest. Gets/keeps people talking, discussing, tossing the ideas around.

Yep, she was interesting and was a trail blazer in the feminist revolution.

Sappho, don't get mad at me. Cuz I like to talk about this stuff.

Mary Daly was an interesting, feisty woman, but I never liked her, and here's why. She was intolerant, deep down. I just can't help but think her ideas and zeal were generated by a wellspring of negativity. Ask any transgender activist what I mean by this; she really looked down on them and said and wrote some pretty dismissive things about them. To this day I think trannies have had the hardest (not to mention most dangerous) time with acceptance even in the gay community and people like Daly were a big reason for this.

And the irony that she stayed 30 yrs at Boston College - an all-male, Jesuit institution when she started there - is pretty startling. She wrote volumes about the evils of patriarchy and its aggressive bent on the destruction of women, and yet the Jesuits - an all-male order of priest-intellectuals - gave her a forum for writing and lecturing on her theories for three decades. (It bears mentioning that the Jesuits are not yr run-o'-the-mill priests; in the U.S. they tend to be progressive more than not. There's an inside Catholic joke that most Jesuits are atheists.)

I'm not saying she was a hypocrite. She probably enjoyed the irony of her position there, and probably figured it was the same anywhere and she might as well teach there as any place else. But I do suspect she was a bit (at least) intellectually dishonest, because she knew that something like this:



was just plain absurd. She said it to get attention.

Anyway, like I said, she was interesting. And yeah, RIP.

[Hildegard]

That's a fair statement. And she was gutsy - that's a good word for her. And I am sure she must have been one tough woman to have stood up to the academe of Boston College - I am sure it wasn't easy for her to fight the admin and faculty, as she did. And I bet she wore them down. I bet there are some great stories being told around the wells of Boston academe tonight.

[Tess]

Here here! Salute!! (I am just chiming in, because of the gutsy comment. I will always salute the gutsy ones. Otherwise, don't know anything about this.)

[Sappho]

That's a fair statement. And she was gutsy - that's a good word for her. And I am sure she must have been one tough woman to have stood up to the academe of Boston College - I am sure it wasn't easy for her to fight the admin and faculty, as she did. And I bet she wore them down. I bet there are some great stories being told around the wells of Boston academe tonight.

HAW! Don't ya know! Makes me laugh just thinking about it!

[Sappho]

http://www.boston.com/news/local/bre...aly_pione.html

Fiercely and playfully -- often at the same time -- Mary Daly used words to challenge the basic precepts of the Catholic Church and Boston College, where she was on the faculty for more than 30 years.

Dr. Daly emerged as a major voice in the burgeoning women's movement with her first book, "The Church and the Second Sex," published in 1968, and "Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation," which appeared five years later. That accomplishment was viewed, then and now, as all the more significant because she wrote and taught at a Jesuit college.

"She was a great trained philosopher, theologian, and poet, and she used all of those tools to demolish patriarchy -- or any idea that domination is natural -- in its most defended place, which is religion," said Gloria Steinem.

Dr. Daly, whose relationship with Boston College grew tempestuous as she insisted that only women could take her classes, died Sunday in Wachusett Manor nursing home in Gardner. She was 81 and her health had failed in the past few years, including recent paralysis due to a neurological condition.


" 'The Church and the Second Sex' was every bit as important in the Catholic world as Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique,' " said James Carroll, an author and columnist for the Globe's opinion pages who formerly was a Catholic priest.

Sister Joan Chittister, a feminist author and a member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pa., said Dr. Daly "literally turned the standard theological concepts upside down. Mary played with language in such a way that you simply had to stop and think. ... You couldn't use old words in the old ways."

Coining words with an Irish wit that could slip from sly to savage, Dr. Daly dismissed college officials as "bore-ocrats" who suffered from "academentia" and "predictably reacted with 'misterical' behavior" -- all in a 1996 autobiographical article for The New Yorker magazine. But beyond her choices to capitalize certain words and remold others like clay, she was deeply serious about language and the way it shapes a sense of self.

"Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin," she wrote in the opening of "Sin Big," her New Yorker piece. "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.' "

Dr. Daly's career at BC, where she joined the theology department faculty in 1966, ultimately ended over what administrators, and many public commentators, saw as her sin of exclusivity. After the college went co-ed in the early 1970s, she only allowed women to take her classes, teaching a few men privately over the years.

She said the presence of men clouded the learning environment, and that a women-only classroom fell within the bounds of academic freedom.

"If a man were in the class he would be very likely to say, 'Oh, no. I am oppressed too.' ... He would say, 'I can't cry. I'm not allowed to express myself, wah, wah,' " she told the Globe in 1999.

The dispute spilled into the courts in the late 1990s when a male student hired a lawyer after Dr. Daly bared him from her class. The college tried to force her into retirement and she sued, claiming breach of contract.

In previous years, Dr. Daly had successfully fought BC's attempt to deny her tenure. This time, she and the college reached a settlement in 2001 and, at 72, she agreed to retire.

Those who knew Dr. Daly and her work, however, say the acrimonious dispute didn't diminish her contributions to feminist philosophy.

"I think she was a central figure for the feminist movement in the 20th century, and hopefully beyond," said Robin Morgan, who edited Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From the Women's Liberation Movement." "She had a fierce intellect and an uncompromising soul that sometimes gave even her most loving friends indigestion, but it was worth it. She redefined the parameters of philosophy. She called herself a feminist philosopher, and she really was -- she was the first.''

Chittister said: "Her legacy is a cloud of women witnesses and male theologians, too, who have now been released into whole new understandings of what the tradition really holds and really means for all of us, male and female. She was a great thinker, she was a great icon. She will be maligned by some, but history will see her very differently."

Dr. Daly grew up in Schenectady, N.Y., where her father was a traveling salesman, selling ice cream freezers. She wrote in The New Yorker that her mother, who "had been 'yanked out' of high school during her sophomore year," encouraged her to find a life outside the realm of housework.

Though she found academia generally inhospitable to a woman who wanted to study theology in the 1950s, she graduated from the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y., with a bachelor's degree, received a master's in English at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and a doctorate from St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Ind.

Teaching a few years left her unfulfilled, so she went to the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where she studied philosophy and theology and "accumulated four degrees,'' she wrote.

"I was getting ready to Sin Big," she wrote in The New Yorker.

Her other books included "Gyn/Ecology, the Metaethics of Radical Feminism" (197, "Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy" (1984), and "Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language," which she called "a dictionary for Wicked women" that she wrote with Jane Caputi in 1987.

One of Dr. Daly's caregivers was reading to her from the "Wickedary" when she died Sunday.

"She basically fairly clearly defined the outer limits of radical feminist theology," said Robert Daly, who chaired the theology department during much of Dr. Daly's tenure and was not related to her. "People around the world are generally grateful for her having done that."

An only child, Dr. Daly had no immediate survivors. Friends plan to schedule a memorial service, but noted that she had her own ideas of how her death should be marked.

"It was Mary's wish that if women or people want to memorialize her in any way they should stay in their own locality and have a get-together where they read or discuss her work," said Linda Barufaldi of San Diego, one of several former graduate students of Dr. Daly's who cared for her as her health declined.

Said Steinem: "In the way that painters and artists become more valuable after they're gone, I hope Mary will be kept alive by people going to her work."