As Mary Daly’s quiver of neologisms expanded with each of her books, readers were often confused if, as Daly liked to say, they joined “mid-voyage.” So requests surfaced in the feminist community for a dictionary that could help newly arrived readers navigate Daly’s texts. Thus was born, in 1987, Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language. Known to most readers simply as the Wickedary, this work was “conjured in cahoots” with Jane Caputi, a former student of Daly’s and a notable feminist in her own right.1 The Wickedary contains essays on Daly’s theories of language, but the editors of this volume have chosen to employ Daly’s own technique of sprinkling Wickedary definitions as epigraphs to each chapter.
The Wickedary marks a transition to Daly’s later writings. From this time forward, she assumed her readers’ willing participation in the universe she had created. Thus, there is an inevitable insularity to these final works: they can remain opaque even to the well-intentioned but uninitiated.
In a trend that all feminists and historians should applaud, many of the key participants in the women’s liberation movement have written autobiographies and memoirs. Daly, like her sometimes-rival Audre Lorde, conveyed her life in mythical terms.2 Daly transformed the title of her friend Andrea Dworkin’s scathing Intercourse to Outercourse. In the book’s subtitle, Daly characterized herself as a pirate, stealing back what patriarchy has stolen from women: The Bedazzling Voyage, Containing Recollections from My Logbook of a Radical Feminist Philosopher. Excerpts from Outercourse in this book provide narrative accounts of key events in Daly’s life and career.
Daly’s final two books—Quintessence (1998) and Amazon Grace (2006)—represent a distinct break from the philosophic rigor that had characterized her previous work. The urgency of political and environmental crises compelled this change. Rycenga recalls frequent searing phone conversations with Daly over the ultimate manifestation of patriarchal necrophilia: the potential for environmental collapse. Women’s liberation, as Daly knew it from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, had morphed into a more diffuse set of social movements. The identity politics of the 1990s held no philosophic interest for her, but the flames of old controversies dogged Daly—race, transgender issues, and the teaching of men. This last issue led to her forced retirement from Boston College, when a lawsuit funded by a conservative think tank forced her teaching practices into public scrutiny. Daly loved teaching, and the loss of the classroom space furthered the isolation that attended advancing age.
As Daly’s relevance to current feminist thought diminished in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, she keenly felt her marginalization. She became more enamored with imagining a pre-patriarchal past and projecting a post-patriarchal future. Some critics dismissed her later works as extreme and eccentric. In typical fashion, she owned the intended aspersions, embracing “the qualitative leap toward self-acceptable deviance as ludic cerebrator, questioner of everything, madwoman, and witch.” It is possible that, like the late works of many great thinkers, these final books contain material not yet fully understood. It is best not to dismiss this self-proclaimed madwoman. She has spoken prophecy more than once.