Despite her formal repudiation of the Catholic Church in the early 1970s, Daly spent virtually all her professional life teaching at Boston College, a Jesuit-run institution. As her own kind of Wiccan-influenced radical feminist, Daly was unique even among iconoclasts, and her career was fraught with controversy. At the time of her death, Robin Morgan hailed her as 'a central figure in twentieth-century feminism.' (1)Īs a feminist emerging out of a Catholic context in the 1960s, Daly was a true iconoclast. In 2007, feminist theologian Caryn Riswold compared her to Martin Luther as a reformer whose ideas left an 'indelible mark' on the religious tradition from which they emerged.

Her second, Beyond God the Father (1973), extended the critique begun in The Church and the Second Sex and marked Daly's formal repudiation of Catholicism in favor of a feminist religion of her own, one she elaborated thereafter in numerous essays and six books, including a memoir and a dictionary. Her first book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), was one of the earliest and most comprehensive radical feminist critiques of Catholicism. Gyn/Ecology is an ambitious book I want to encourage students to learn from the mistakes of earlier radical claims while not giving up on the possibilities of radicalism altogether.THE FEMINIST THEORIST AND THEOLOGIAN Mary Daly died in January of 2010, at the age of eighty-one. I am calling for rethinking Gyn/Ecology not because I think we can recuperate it from its constitutive problems, but because analyzing the ways in which calls for liberation are intertwined with fundamental exclusions can provide insight into current feminist debates over such issues as combating sexual violence and the resurgence of trans-exclusionary feminism. Not surprisingly, such a far-reaching project also has foundational flaws in particular, its essentialist conception of gender is explicitly transphobic and implicitly racist. Here, I revisit Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, an ambitious project that calls for overthrowing patriarchy.

Teaching texts from the seventies that make “bad feminist” claims in the midst of other powerful arguments can contribute to nuanced understandings of feminist pasts, in order to intervene in oversimplified progress or loss narratives that often characterize current representations of lesbian-feminism. The inquiry into teaching feminist “classics” seems apropos now, given a resurgence of anxieties about the relationships between political beliefs and sexual/gender identities, anxieties that echo those of the 1970s.

Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly