Although she would have reservations about the directions I ultimately ended up going, Mary Daly was a huge part of my decision to become a theologian. Thanks to a tip from a fellow Kossack, I learned that she passed away on Sunday. Throughout her life, she always pushed feminism into more radical insights, and was one of the most important figures in feminist religious thought of the later twentieth century. I will not even attempt to do her work and life justice here, but I will provide a few links, and some thoughts.
My first year of college, I came across a couple of references to Daly's work. The first was in Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza's In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. I had picked up that book at a used bookstore and spent most of my first two years of college picking through it, not understanding most of what Schussler Fiorenza was up to (it clicked later in college). Schussler Fiorenza was basically critical of Daly's work, but I kind of missed the critique and just saw something that sounded interesting. Later, I read a student essay in a school journal that discussed Daly in a more positive light, and my interest was cemented.
Now, my first year of college, I was a very closeted gay boy, who sought in religion an escape from sexual desire. There was much more to my religious adventure than that, but that was a large part of the picture. So, I was disappointed when I went to the library and found that the only book by Mary Daly that wasn't checked out was Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy. In those days, that title was kind of a turn-off for me. So, some days later, I returned to the library, and still everything but Pure Lust was checked out. So, with a bit of resignation, I went into the stacks and retrieved it.
What I found there was a trenchant critique of Christianity, and a passion for life I'd rarely seen before, and a singular wit that made language come alive in a whole new way. The book was a threat, a frontal assault on almost everything I had come to hold dear, but the ethical force of it was undeniable. I still went to church on Sundays, and it was still an important part of my life, but there was a clear dissonance between what I was reading in Daly and what I was experiencing in church. That dissonance, along with coming out - a process reading Daly facilitated - and getting involved in radical politics, forced me to rethink everything, and that rethinking prompted a search for answers that ultimately sent me into the study of theology. While I found many Christian theologians who answered the questions I had to my satisfaction, my initial encounter with Mary Daly has meant that I have always had a somewhat liminal relation to Christianity, sometimes leaning towards rejection, sometimes leaning towards acceptance. And that liminal stance has brought me to a point that I really do not think of Christianity in terms of a set of doctrines to which I have to assent, but a resource I can mine for what is useful, always with an eye to what is damaging. In the last few years, I've been leaning more towards retrieving what's useful, but the foundation for that retrieval is based on years of moving through critiques.
The best place to start an engagement with Daly's thought is probably her autobiography Outercourse: The Bedazzling Voyage, in which she says in typically vivid fashion, "I wanted to throw my life as far as it would go." She charts her journey from studying to be a theologian in the Roman Catholic Thomist tradition to rejecting the Church and keeping her thought moving into more radical perspectives. Her thought on the cusp of that decision can be found in her essay After the Death of God the Father, published in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. I just noticed that it was published five days before I was born, which feels significant in an uncanny way right now. The following year, in 1972, Daly preached on the Exodus at the Harvard Divinity School Chapel, and called for a general departure from patriarchal religions, a point she reinforced by walking out of the service. In Outercourse, she reports that she expected maybe a handful of people to walk out with her, but she had to keep up with a stampede. In the days that followed, liberal ministers would call her to request that she do something like that at their churches, to which she responded, "They didn't understand that I meant it."
For Daly, that sense of separation also meant that she embraced lesbian separatism, and taught classes only to women, though she would teach men in independent studies. Daly understood that the process of women naming their own reality was inevitably hampered and slowed by the process of having to explain it to men, who would react to feminist rage with defensiveness or belittlement. This commitment ultimately led to attacks on her work in the 90s during the early phases of conservative backlash and the trivialization of leftist political thought as "political correctness."
Daly's other books include The Church and the Second Sex, originally published in 1968, later reissued with an engaging Post-Christian Introduction, in which she offers a dialogue between her Christian and post-Christian selves. If you read only one thing by Daly, I would recommend that introduction. Other books are Beyond God the Father: A Philosophy of Women's Liberation and Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. I recommended the latter book to a friend when she asked for some books on feminism. Later, she came back to me and said, "I'm reading this book, and I can feel my brain changing and I really like it!!!"
Nancy Frankenberry has provided a very good contextualization of Daly's thought in her article on Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Some other memorial writings can be found in the National Catholic Reporter, the Washington Post, and the Advocate. She deserves a more thorough review here, but I have other tasks calling.