Mary Daly

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Mary Daly : biography

October 16, 1928 – January 3, 2010

Daly’s work continues to influence feminism and feminist theology, as well as the developing concept of biophilia as an alternative and challenge to social necrophilia. She was an ethical vegetarian and animal rights activist. Gyn/Ecology, Pure Lust, and Webster’s First New Intergalactic Wickedary all endorse anti-vivisection and anti-fur positions. Daly was a member of the advisory board of Feminists For Animal Rights, a group which is now defunct.

Daly created her own theological anthropology based around the context of what it means to be a woman. She created a thought-praxis that separates the world into the world of false images that create oppression and the world of communion in true being. She labeled these two areas foreground and Background respectively. Daly considered the foreground the realm of patriarchy and the Background the realm of Woman. She argued that the Background is under and behind the surface of the false reality of the foreground. The foreground, for Daly, was a distortion of true being, the paternalistic society in which she said most people live. It has no real energy, but drains the “life energy” of women residing in the Background. In her view, the foreground creates a world of poisons that contaminate natural life. She called the male-centered world of the foreground necrophilic, hating all living things. In contrast, she conceived of the Background as a place where all living things connect.

Gyn/Ecology

Audre Lorde expressed concern over Gyn/Ecology, citing homogenizing tendencies, and a refusal to acknowledge the "herstory and myth" of women of color. The letter,Audre Lorde’s letter is discussed in Dr. Daly’s book, Outercourse. and Daly’s apparent decision not to publicly respond, greatly affected the reception of Daly’s work among other feminist theorists, and has been described as a "paradigmatic example of challenges to white feminist theory by feminists of color in the 1980s."

Daly’s reply letter to Lorde,Amazon Grace (N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 1st ed. [1st printing?] Jan. 2006), pp. 25–26 (reply text). dated 4½ months later, was found in 2003 in Lorde’s files after she died.Amazon Grace, supra, pp. 22–26, esp. pp. 24–26 & nn. 15–16, citing Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, by Alexis De Veaux (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1st ed. 2004) (ISBN 0393019543 or ISBN 0-393-32935-6). Daly’s reply was followed in a week by a meeting with Lorde at which Ms. Daly said, among other things, that Gyn/Ecology was not a compendium of goddesses but limited to "those goddess myths and symbols that were direct sources of Christian myth," but whether this was accepted by Lorde was unknown at the time.See Amazon Grace, supra, p. 23 ("week" per pp. 24 & 23).

Views on men

She argued against sexual equality,Daly, Mary, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1978 & 1990), pp. 384 & 375–376 (fnn. omitted) (prob. all content except New Intergalactic Introduction 1978 & prob. New Intergalactic Introduction 1990) (ISBN 0-8070-1413-3)) (New Intergalactic Introduction is separate from Introduction: The Metapatriarchal Journey of Exorcism and Ecstasy). believing that women ought to govern men;Daly, Mary, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, pp. 15 & xxvi (p. xxvi in New Intergalactic Introduction (prob. 1990)). Daly advocated a reversal of sociopolitical power between the sexes.Daly, Mary, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p. xxvi (New Intergalactic Introduction (prob. 1990)).

In an interview with What Is Enlightenment? magazine, Daly said, "I don’t think about men. I really don’t care about them. I’m concerned with women’s capacities, which have been infinitely diminished under patriarchy. Not that they’ve disappeared, but they’ve been made subliminal. I’m concerned with women enlarging our capacities, actualizing them. So that takes all my energy."