Mary E. Hunt
Mary Daly was born of working-class Irish American parents in Schenectady, New York, where she grew up. Her father, Francis X. Daly, was a salesman; her mother, Anna Catherine Daly, would prove a lifelong support and friend to Mary, her only child.
Daly was educated in Catholic schools and graduated with a degree in English from St. Rose College in Albany, New York, in 1950, and an MA in English at The Catholic University of America in 1952. She earned her first doctorate in religion at St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, in 1954, at a time when women were unwelcome in most U.S. doctoral programs in theology. After a few years of teaching, she supplemented her first PhD with two more doctorates in 1963, one in philosophy and the other in sacred theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. In Fribourg, a lot of her studies were in Latin, a language skill that stood her in good stead in later creative endeavors. Her inveterate ability to articulate new ideas, coin new words, and redefine others always featured careful, critical attention to etymology.
Daly spent the 1960s in Europe studying and teaching. In a series of postcards to her mother (who spent some time with her in Switzerland), she wrote of her excitement at being in Rome for the Second Vatican Council. She was a young graduate student hanging around the edges of the Council, chatting up the press, learning about church politics, and collecting tidbits of ecclesial gossip. She was in her intellectual glory. Daly told her mother not to worry if she did not return to Fribourg on the appointed day, since she was having such a great time in the Eternal City.
She saw up close and personal in Rome the workings of a patriarchal organization. Gradually the reality of institutional sexism became painfully obvious and eventually too much to bear. As a woman, indeed as a Catholic woman with far more theological education than many of the assembled bishops and cardinals who had voting rights when she did not even have voice, Mary Daly simply had no place in the Roman Catholic Church.
She did attempt to remain in the church prior to leaving it. Accepting a teaching position at Boston College in 1966, she produced her first major book, The Church and the Second Sex, in 1968. This reformist effort, which pointed out the problems with the sexist legacy of the church, brought her some positive academic attention, but open hostility from her academic colleagues at Boston College. Their attempt to terminate her contract brought forth protests from academics, from her own students, and from defenders of academic freedom, leading to her vindication and retention at the college.
However, she took from this that being a reformer was, for her, ineffective. From that experience, and her travels around the globe, she launched her lifelong efforts to expose and change the inferior place of most women in the world. Gradually her scope enlarged to include special concern for animals and Earth, for the eradication of war and the end of poverty. But it was her insistence on the well-being of women that led her and other pioneering colleagues to create the feminist theologies that are taken for granted today.
Mary Daly was a writer and a teacher. Her writings speak for themselves, beginning with her dissertations and ending with her clarion call to “Sin Big.” Her audience was the world, not the academy. She lectured widely and spoke often at conferences, bookstores, seminars, and even a restaurant. It is safe to say she is one of the few professors of philosophy/theology with a published interview in the New Yorker and an appearance on Roseanne Barr’s television show.
This popular approach did not help her to become a full professor at Boston College; her application was rejected in 1975. The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences spelled out the problem in Daly’s regard: “Nevertheless in arriving at a determination of an appropriate level of excellence in your publications, the Committee recognized the contrast between your works and the more typical demonstrations of scholarly methodology in publications by which candidates for promotion to Professor are judged” (Outercourse, p. 389). Indeed the contrast was and remains vivid, but not in the way the dean intended. The academy does not necessarily reward its best and brightest. More’s the pity.
Daly considered her books to be her legacy. Beyond God the Father (1973) remains on the syllabi of many courses in feminist studies in religion, indeed of many general introductions to religion and women’s studies. Sad to say, it is still fresh and provocative despite decades of efforts by many feminists to eradicate the problems Mary Daly pointed to in patriarchal religions. Exclusive use of male language and metaphors for the divine were but the tip of the patriarchal iceberg.
She received hundreds of letters (pre–e-mail) from women who thanked her for helping them make sense of their lives. The theologian Rita Nakashima Brock described Mary Daly as “perhaps the most transformative theologian of the 20th century,” and asserted that “Beyond God the Father remains the landmark book in feminist theology.”
The controversies opened in Gyn/Ecology (1978) remain part of contemporary conversation. Complexities of race, class, and nationality remain to be unpacked by Mary’s successors. Debates about her positions on race and her opinions on transsexuals rage in blogs and at conferences long after her death. Few colleagues in religion exercised such a broad and diverse reach across disciplines and throughout activist groups. It may not have gained her an academic promotion, but her work certainly made an enormous difference in the world.
Mary Daly’s autobiographical Outercourse is a compelling read about one woman’s efforts to unmake the world. Her life was rather solitary, with her closest companion for many years a beloved cat. However, she was wonderfully well accompanied by people she never met who remain in her intellectual debt, as well as by close collaborators and friends. Happily, a small team of friends and colleagues, myself included, was privileged to accompany her in her waning years. We ensured that she lived and died with dignity and peace. She had taught us that sisterhood was important and we deepened in that knowledge as she aged.
Daly was at heart a teacher. Over her decades (1967–1999) on the faculty at Boston College, she loved the classroom and her students. While much has been made of her decision to teach men separately from women, few people realize that in the early years at Boston College her students were nearly all males. Some of them recall her very fondly, including a young man of color who was viciously harassed by some white racist classmates. He confided his situation not to his Jesuit professors, but to Mary Daly, who noticed his distress, listened to and understood his oppression because of her own, and supported him as he regained his academic and emotional footing. So much for claims that Daly disliked men.
She enjoyed the Socratic approach, always questioning her students, with keen interest in their answers. In later years, after she finished university teaching, I invited her to join my interns at WATER (Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual) for a seminar by telephone. She reveled in it, asking the young women what they felt about a topic as well as what they thought. She was wildly intuitive, a nice personal bookend to her raving rationality. She loved trees and plants; she enjoyed nothing more than a swim in the pond behind her apartment. She was part mystic.
Her last students were part of a “hedge school” she started. These were informal discussions and seminars with feminist graduate students in Boston who wanted to learn with her. Appropriately, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hedge schools were created by Catholics who resisted converting to the Anglican tradition. Daly, true to her roots, revived the idea to feminist ends.
Mary Daly attended many professional meetings. She said she went to the American Academy of Religion gatherings to see her friends. She was part of the group that initiated that organization’s Women’s Caucus. She was active early in the Women and Religion Section of the AAR. She always liked to have a panel on her latest publication even though she criticized “academentia” as a locus for intellectual work.
Mary Daly was controversial in her life and remains controversial after her death. She challenged basic assumptions about how the world ought to be. She asked no one’s pardon for trying to make it different, especially when it came to women. Her methods were not universally appreciated, even by many who agreed with her goals. But she changed the world by opening up the hard philosophical questions of Being and Sinning, by positing the importance of all women, including Crones, Lesbians, and Hags, by unmasking patriarchy in its myriad disguises, by insisting on sharing “life energy” with all beings without exception.
Religious studies after Mary Daly is a new thing for which future generations are in her debt. Hers is a legacy to celebrate by delving deeply into tough questions that reshape the world and enjoying the process as much as she did.
She died in Gardner, Massachusetts, on January 3, 2010, at the age of eighty-one, after several years of declining health. She is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.