In Memoriam: Mary Daly

Cambridge, MA. Many readers will know that Professor Mary Daly, pioneering, brilliant, and controversial feminist theologian, died last week at age 81.  See Jim Martin’s note on this too. Professor Daly taught for some 30 years at Boston College, and so she was my colleague there from 1984, when I joined the faculty, until her retirement (forced or free) about a decade ago. Her years at BC were in general not happy ones, at least in a contextual sense. Long before I arrived, the relationship between Professor Daly and her colleagues had gone sour, at times contentious, angry, demonstrative (including student strikes), distant, absent, silent. By 1984, she was no longer participating in departmental meetings and committees, and was largely not present at all in the Department — except in the way a very famous, monumental intellectual and spiritual force made her presence felt. We would nod to one another in the hallway, occasionally say hello, but that was the limit of our contact. It was sad.
     Mary Daly was by all accounts a radical thinker. I am not a scholar of her work, and cannot summarize it with any precision, but my sense that when she assessed the condition of women in the modern world, in religions, and in the Catholic Church, all taken in light of her own experience trying to make her way as a pioneering woman theologian – with multiple doctorates — in a 1960s Church not quite ready for women theologians, she came to the stark conclusion that there was no simple remedy to the bias, as if small changes would right the wrongs and make women equal to men. Rather, the biases and distortions so harmful to women permeated the entirety of human experience, and traditional religions were infected with pervasive bias, in ideas, language, practices, and social structures. Accordingly, women had to be radical in their critiques, taking apart of the whole structures and not just adjusting details. For this, women were better off outside the religions, Catholicism included, and for a time at least, better off nurturing their own conversations and ways of living, without the presence, help or hindrance of men, even well-meaning men. So Mary Daly was a Catholic intellectual who decided for theological reasons, and by personal imperative, that she could no longer be a Christian. 
     I heard Professor Daly speak once on campus at BC, and was impressed with the force of her ideas and her totally brilliant play with the English language. I remember most vividly how, in keeping with her classroom practice (such as led to her departure from the faculty), after the lecture she did not take questions from men. When finally one of the women in the audience asked her why, she replied that it was important for men to have the experience of being ignored, overlooked, not allowed to speak. I didn’t have a question for her that evening, but appreciated her point: unless we ourselves experience marginalization, the brute force of power imposed on us, we really won’t be able to get what it is like to be a perennially demeaned and oppressed person.
     Only once did I actually sit down and talk with her, about 20 years ago, when she and I and another colleague met off campus for tea. As I recall now, it was a bit uncomfortable, since such moments were so rare. I cannot recall much of what we talked about — her academic work and ours, I suppose, not wanting to ruin a moment of peace — but I am glad that I had the opportunity to meet her in a more humane and open setting, at least once.
     Did she affect my work? Not directly, though her presence at BC kept reminding us all that safe ideas safely expressed within safe structures are rather useless in the long run, and harmful. No one who lives by ideas, and gets paid for it as a living (as do professors), should be satisfied with just saying things that sound good but never actually change things. I agree, even if my writing has headed in a different direction. Indeed, I remain resolutely Roman Catholic, in and of the Church, and I would not step away from a commitment to Christ. My entire career’s work has been based on the confidence that conversations are possible, that we need people like and unlike ourselves, that radical resistance is nonviolent even in word, and that God is always helping us to overcome even what may seem at some level irreconcilable differences. I also disagree with her on particular issues, even if one must be careful to keep even her radical ideas — about sexuality, abortion, and so forth — in the larger and vastly intelligent context of her overall vision and word. She did not simply think like the rest of us and differ on one or another point of ethics; rather, she recast the entire discussion in light of women’s experience, as it is and ideally should be. But despite divergences, Mary Daly still reminded me that unless we are radical, we are not really thinking.
     I would guess that if she ever read or thought about any of my writings, she mostly likely would have seen me as still part of, caught in, structures she thought had to be overturned. The situation in which we found ourselves in at BC was one in which we could not easily talk to one another. But she, unlike me, probably felt that distance and non-communication were necessary visible signs of an extreme and extremely unjust situation, while I felt that there is no situation in which we cannot do better by finding ways to talk to one another, vulnerable even to one another’s hard words.
     But I also know that Professor Daly was a mentor and inspiration to a generation and more of feminist theologians. Some parted company with her, because they found her too radical, or too old-fashioned absolutist or too separatist, or after a while no longer imaginative enough about the hybridity of human experience, gendered and otherwise. But even then, a vast multitude of women thinkers, and men too, owe so very much to her, this angry, relentless, clear-sighted magician and priestess of theological and sacred words. Even if I have not much quoted from her books (I did that only once, I think), the way I think about Hinduism and Christianity, and about the nature of the Church today, is inevitably, implicitly indebted to Mary Daly, who changed the context in which we think about humans and God.
     I close on a different note: It is a tribute to her person and presence, I have learned, that even in her long last illness, unprotected by family, she was surrounded and supported by women who loved her dearly and made it possible that she not be alone in those last days. To get a feel for her work, to inspire you and/or rile you, try for instance this site that lists some quotations from her work. I close with just several of the quotations given there: “If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination;” “Courage is like — it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging;” “Why indeed must ‘God’ be a noun? Why not a verb – the most active and dynamic of all.”
     Mary Daly, rest in peace.