Mary Daly Lives On
by: Nancy Vedder-Shults on January 15th, 2010 | 8 Comments »
I’ve been reading the GoddessScholars list and surfing the web looking for eulogies of Mary Daly, the radical feminist theologian (from theos, ancient Greek for God) who made thealogy possible (from thea, ancient Greek for Goddess). And in reading through several of them, I’ve been remembering how important she was to me in the early 1970s. At that point in time, I could buy every book on feminism that came out, and I did. But not each one opened up my mind like Beyond God the Father.
I can tell from my notes that although it was published in 1973, I must have read it in 1974. At that time I was a graduate student in the German Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a founding member of the Feminist Criticism Collective. Feminist literary criticism didn’t exist at that time, so we were creating it as we went along.
Here are just a few of the important ideas I found in Beyond God the Father:
1) That women had “the power of naming stolen from them, and that the liberation of language is rooted in the liberation of ourselves” (p.8)
2) That in the women’s movement, “[W]omen are hearing ourselves and each other, and out of this supportive hearing emerge new words” (p. 8). I guess I must have forgotten that Daly originated this thought, because a couple of years later Nelle Morton said it again as a slogan, and that’s when it stuck for me. Morton said femininst “women were hearing each other into speech.”
3) That we needed to overcome “methodolatry” (p. 11).
4) That “if God is male, then the male is God” (p. 19).
5) The distinction between “power-over” and “power-with” or participation in ultimate reality (the Divine) (p. 29). I must have forgotten these constructs as well, because when Starhawk elaborated these two and added a third — “power-with” (or influence, power of the collective, etc.) — in the 1980s, I took this in as something new.
And that’s just the first 30 pages. I think I better reread this book, and finally finish some of her other tomes.
I’ve also heard from several Goddess Scholars about the effect Mary Daly had on their lives. I’d like to share some of their stories with you:
Pat Monaghan,–award-winning poet, professor at DePaul University, where she teaches science and literature, and author of the newly revised Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines as well as Red-Haired Girl from the Bog and many more — wrote that one of her friends said in hearing of Mary Daly’s death,
“I’m not ready to be without my mother yet!” Those of us in the generation after Mary … have much to be grateful for. Like many other 60′s feminists, I remember reading Mary’s Beyond God the Father and realizing that it was important for feminism to have a spiritual dimension if any lasting change was to be made. Turns out religious change is the hardest; we have seen a calcification of religious views over the last 30 years, tied no doubt to the increase of women’s status in developed countries.
Barbara Ardinger, Ph.D. and author of A Woman’s Book of Rituals and Celebrations and Practicing the Presence of the Goddess, wrote that some years ago Daly was one of her favorite authors.
On my bookshelves, I have half a dozen bibles, and on the shelf right below them, half a dozen of her books.
Layne Redmond, creator of many recordings and author of When the Drummers were Women, also noted that Mary Daly had been a great influence on her thinking in the early nineties when she created her drumming/ritual/performance ensemble The Mob of Angels. She added that Daly’s
[W]ork also completely colored the way I proceeded with the research for When The Drummers Were Women and really everything that has evolved from this period of my life. I re-dedicated my recent recording, Epitaph of Seikilos in her honor. This is the oldest-known composed and notated piece of music found to date.
But my favorite stories were told by Louise Pare, director of the Center for Women’s Spirituality Education and Empowerment in Ashland, Oregon, and Tanice Foltz, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Indiana University Northwest. Both told of their first encounters with Mary Daly. Each tale described vivid memories of a remarkable woman. At the time she heard Daly speak, Louise was just coming into her own as a feminist, while teaching theology at a Catholic High School. Louise wrote that she was en/tranced that night (using one of Daly’s characteristic linguistic devises of splitting words to create new connotations or meanings). Louise continued,
When a man raised his hand to ask a question, [Daly] stated clearly that, while she respected his presence in the group, she would take NO questions/comments from men. I was amazed and delighted. [T]he women I had traveled with [and I] were like young girls who had just discovered our own power and were giddy with the beauty, magic and import of it all! The power of her language/play was of a level I had never before encountered. We were all so excited and energized. I immediately bought her book and kept buying her books as each came out.
Tanice’s encounter was similar. But it was preceded by an experience that puts Mary Daly’s speech in context:
[Tanice] had [just] given a talk on Witchcraft – myths and realities- at the nearby [Indiana University Northwest] Newman Center, where, I was told, church-going women had surrounded the building and were conducting an “exorcism” of sorts.
Tanice describes her university as a commuter campus, “tucked in racism, sexism, conservatism and the Bible Belt.” When Mary Daly arrived, she attracted a large crowd, and once again refused to take any questions from men. Tanice adds that
I’ll never forget that because every time any of the male faculty who had been present passed me in the hallways, they always made a big deal about “equality” and that this was reverse discrimination, and why can’t women share their rituals, etc. with men?
She concluded by saying
Anyway, I’m so glad that we were able to bring Mary Daly in– she was a huge hit and really stirred up campus conversations — and community conversations too — for a good while. Her impact has been felt around the world, and we are better off for the feminist challenges she brought to the foreground! Hail Mary, Queen of Righteous Rage!
Exactly my sentiments!
If you want to see the eulogies I found on the web, here’s a list:
NY Times obituary
The Washington Post
On Faith
msmagazine
National Catholic Reporter eulogy
feministe
tigerbeatdown
feministing
gaynz
shewired
girlscholar
On Faith/Newsweek/Washington Post
T. Thorn Coyle
catholicanarchy
hereswhatidontget
trouble
lydiabreen
Sarah Nicholson — if you’re interested in the evolution of Mary Daly’s feminist theology
salon.com — about her 1999 tenure fight
I want to thank Audrey (who reponded to Dave Belden’s original post about Daly in Tikkun Daily) for getting me to look at Daly’s work again.
Thank you Nancy for these words about Mary who I will miss. But among her many words are also words in Gyn/Ecology where she refers to transgendered people as “Frankensteinian.” She called transsexualism a “male problem” and named post-operative transsexualism a “contrived and artifactual condition. Since I am a gender queer butch who moved past the kind of essentialism Mary wrote about and practiced I find myself at odds with the kind of transphobia she practiced and find myself sad at her passing but not to the point where I won’t mention these flaws in her works.
As a male, and in a previous post, a fan of Mary Daly, the most important gift she gave to me was twofold:
To make it clear there was another way to see Deity.Truly God the Father was dealt a serious and, my own opinion, a mortal blow, as a metaphor accurately defining the Divine.
To allow me to understand that my sisters have an absolute right to set boundaries and to enforce them. This means there are places where I am not invited to go. I celebrate that. It means my own privacy means something. It gave me permission to begin to explore my own inner emotional world.
Jim –
It’s great to hear from a man who gained from Mary Daly’s work. Most men personalize the attacks on patriarchy that were front and center in Daly’s work. And most men misunderstand the need for an autonomous sphere that any oppressed group needs from time to time. We need to create a space in which we look at the world from just our perspective alone and begin to create a vision from that understanding. So for women (and other oppressed groups), it has more to do with supporting each other in order to be more successful in our struggles against patriarchy.
It obviously had a different meaning for you. I would love to hear what exactly you mean when you say, “My privacy means something. It gave me permission to begin to explore my own inner emotional world.”
Naomi –
Mary Daly gave rise to one trend in the women’s movement that I disagree with completely — the creation of “born-women-only space.” Her transphobia and essentialsim lives on in some groups, and that’s a sad fact. I believe, in contrast, that we should accept the self-definition of any person. Since you define yourself as a “gender queer butch,” that’s what you are for me.
See a poem for Mary Daly entitled “Outrageous Oracle” by Mary Saracino posted at http://www.newversenews.blogspot.com/2010/01/outrageous-oracle.html.
Just a few updates here. I think Mary Daly had every right to question what the medical establishment was really up to in creating male to female transgendered. As for Frankensteinian, I believe Mary Daly was referring to the doctors who willy nilly perform these operations, and that it is once again the male medical establishment that thinks if can create biological women. Frankenstein was the doctor, not the person operated on. You have to read Mary Shelly, and not the patriarchal commentary.
Someone mentioned Gandhi, and Mary Daly exposed his dubious practice of sleeping with underage girls in the nude. Today, we would call this child molestation. Daly exposed the duplicity, the creepiness of the men in weakness (Sonia Johnson suggested that women not use the phrase “men in power” because it fueled male supremacy). What men feared was women’s power, it’s why they burned witches, it’s why they torture women, it’s why men rape women. Mary Daly was uncompromising in her defense of women, and in her condemnation of male medical practices worldwide.
P.S. And as for male pronouns being used to describe god, well this is alive and well all over the place. As is the comback of the word “mankind” to describe all human beings. I hear this all the time yet again. The horrendous insults hurled at Hilary Clinton, the condescending news coverage by the male media establishment was another thing Mary noticed.
I am looking forward to the day when women are in our full power, when we no longer have to deal with men with guns, when the world is free of rapists, and where women have full access to education and safety. Mary Daly said that patriarchy stole everything from women, and that we are duty bound to name the theft of our time, our money and our bodies to reclaim the sisterhood of women. She meant it, and she stood by her words with deeds. Every time she called on women only at her lectures, she was recovering thousands of years that women have always been silenced in “mixed settings.” Every time I go to a conference where all men are speaking, all men are talking, and women are in a constant state of being silenced and marginalized, I know we need about 1000 new Mary Dalys of genius to take on patriarchy, the wield the double ax, to end the erasure of lesbians, to name the attrocities, and to keep reminding women that we have to go further than we have ever gone before. Male tyranny has been a human virus for a very long time, and it certainly is nowhere near ending. Mary Daly gave women the tools to claim liberation on our own terms with no quarter given, and she never backed down.
Audrey, I just read your two responses, and I have to say, they’re a wonderful, passionate, almost poetic evocation of my feelings and the feelings of many feminists today. Your words raised my energy level for the work ahead, work that sometimes seems endless, but work that is perhaps the most important that we can do today.
I wanted you to know about a website that you might enjoy that just went online. It’s called Women Waking the World — http://womenwakingtheworldwwwblog.ning.com/. I’m not sure that I agree entirely with their perspective on “women’s power” — it seems somewhat biologistic to me — but I do agree with their premise that when women start having the political and social power we should have the world will really start to change.