Mary Daly 1928 – 2010

Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher and theologian who taught for more than thirty years at Boston College, where she insisted on the right to teach women-only courses. The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father offered a sustained feminist critique of patriarchal religion, arguing that the symbol of an exclusively male God serves to legitimize male domination. Gyn/Ecology and Pure Lust developed an audacious philosophical and linguistic project of reclaiming and inventing words to articulate a radical female metaethics, drawing on philosophy, theology, mythology, and lexicography in equal measure.

Mary Daly was born at Schenectady, New York, in October 1928 and grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family. Refused entry to American Catholic doctoral programmes because she was a woman, she took two doctorates at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland — in theology in 1963 and in philosophy in 1965. She joined the theology department at Boston College in 1966 and taught there until 1999, when the Jesuit administration forced her into retirement after she refused to admit men to her advanced women's-studies courses.

Her books include The Church and the Second Sex (1968), Beyond God the Father (1973), Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (1984), the Wickedary (1987, compiled with Jane Caputi), the autobiographical Outercourse (1992), Quintessence... Realizing the Archaic Future (1998), and Amazon Grace (2006).

Daly moved from a reformist Catholic feminism in The Church and the Second Sex to an explicitly post-Christian radical lesbian feminism in which patriarchal religion is itself the original sin against the female 'Self'. She forged a distinctive philosophical vocabulary of neologisms — Be-ing, Background and Foreground, the Wild — designed to expose and overturn the deep grammar of patriarchy. She died at Gardner, Massachusetts, in January 2010.